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The Green Knight (2021)
Disregard the morons - it's good
This page is being torpedoed by people who are offended that a movie doesn't spoonfeed them the same narrative and aesthetic cliches they've become accustomed to, while in the same breath idiotically complaining about 'Hollywood' letting them down again (whatever that means).
Coming in, one should be aware that this is a fairly low budget movie (~15 million) with, as much as I dislike the phrase, 'indie sensibilities'. It's good, but far from a masterpiece. Many parts didn't work for me - it (intentionally) lacks a certain directness, and also doesn't have have quite the emotional impact I believe it's going for and seems convinced it has. However, I didn't find it boring outside one or two scenes. If you can 'endure' a movie paced like Taxi Driver, you should be okay with this. If everything not instantly gratifying induces an overpowering animal rage in you, stay away.
What I enjoyed most about the movie were the inventive cinematography, the mostly great acting, soundtrack and some well done scenes of surrealism. Not showy, theatrical surrealism, but a sudden feeling of unreality that's difficult to pull off in any medium. On the whole, it was a bit predictable and its resolution fairly inconsequential. The latter was again, in a sense, deliberate, but wasn't realized as well as I'd hoped for. Generally, I personally would have liked it more if it were even weirder, darker, and incorporated more visceral brutality, dove deeper into that nightmarish fairy tale/fable vibe.
But I agree with what other reviewers have written: It's very rare to see a well-made, unconventional and intelligent movie in the fantasy genre. I believe not only 'nowadays', as people reflexively say, but throughout the history of film. Maybe that's ignorance on my part, but I can't think of many examples. So, even though I have my issues with it, I'm very glad that it exists and am embarrassed by and for the hoards of adult toddlers here, bawling in the face of something that requires a bit (and not even that much) patience and effort on the side of viewer.
I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)
Bloated, tonally confused and overly nihilistic - still interesting
I thought the pig was very cool. Other than that, the ever compounding navel-gazing nihilism of characters bored with their own inadequacy, and their inability to communicate anything meaningful beyond standard intellectual tropes, was a bummer. The movie -- because otherwise it wouldn't be Kaufman-- is pedantically self-aware, which extends to the protagonists who frequently engage in off-handed existential debates without conviction. Sure, that is kind of the point. But there is something obnoxiously joyless about taking fairly interesting concepts (TV-show plots are like viruses that just want to find a home in our minds/ Peoples' selves are not their 'own creations', and more of a mosaic of opinions and facts they have absorbed from others/etc) and scattering them onto every other scene, merely to have the characters make one more remark upon whose conclusion they can look miserably out the window.
As many have said, the basic idea behind the movie, combined with the apt setting of a road trip, a creepy farm, the rural menacing tedium in general, has a lot of potential to create an unnerving atmosphere. Had the movie been more grounded, had there been more actually coherent scenes --less inter-cutting, fewer abrupt transitions, fewer aggressive 4th wall-breaking-- it might have managed to be unsettling. As Kaufman chose to construct it, it never convinces you (never tries, actually) that anything within it is more than a clever artifice propped up to sermonize about the various dreadful aspects of the human condition. The film can't help but constantly blow its load and become very very explicit about its themes and how much of a surreal fantasy it is, as opposed to a straightforward narrative, so that it rarely manages to create a visceral moment of tension. There's also a weird amnesiac quality to it: Sometimes the narrative will forget about the multitude of loads already blown, and after having served up what seems like a complete deconstruction of the plot, tries to return to a sense of normalcy, as though nothing has happened. At these points, the execution doesn't seem willfully idiosyncratic anymore, and rather just shoddy.
However, by sheer virtue of the great acting and universally relatable themes being brought up over and over again (what is success? aging is scary; dying is scary; being a nobody is scary; what is art; what it's purpose?) it can become 'engrossing' and thought provoking. But even when thoughts were provoked, I felt annoyed at the bluntness and self-indulgence of the scenes giving rise to them. Side-note: visually the movie had some truly high heights, but was as inconsistent as its structure. In my view it should have been much darker, less saturated, which would not only have fit the story better, but also made sense in that the cinematographer already showed the amazing atmospheres he's capable of creating in Ida.
Not that anybody should give a damn, but this may be the movie that makes me change my mind about Kaufman (still, I will always love Being John Malkovich). I read the book only because I heard about this film-project, and even though I wasn't fully amazed by it, it was the much more interesting experience among the two. Whereas the novel had a fresh angle, this just felt like "Kaufman film #X": The protagonists are not people --not even archetypes-- but collections of abstract sentiments; there is dreamlike/meta-stuff, that has an awkward theatrical vibe; everybody is sort of miserable by default; things seem somewhat normal at the beginning, and head towards a crescendo of self-reference and incoherent existential musings.
He did it much better in Synecdoche (in a sense, the protagonists of both stories try to accomplish a similar thing in very different ways). This one feels like a remake of that movie that wasn't constructed from the ground up, but instead injected into and parasitically reared in the body of a pretty decent and sparse, albeit mostly unrelated, horror novel. I think it is worth watching, however, because it's the kind of work whose potency may very much vary, depending on the mood you're in. Being far from an optimistic, jolly person myself, I personally still found myself not only bored, but acutely annoyed, by Kaufman's thousandth attempt to show us the hypocrisy, arbitrariness and wretched misery that is apparently the life of every vaguely self-reflective modern middle class individual.
Valhalla Rising (2009)
Cryptic non-plot and blood splatter.jpeg
I went into this movie with the expectation of watching something slow, vaguely philosophical, but overall visually interesting and stylized. That's basically how Valhalla Rising tends to be described. While the first predictions were definitely quickly confirmed, it became also rapidly apparent that this film isn't beautifully shot at all- but rather has an extremely garish, digital amateur-look.
This is the main reason I'm writing a review, by the way. You see, most people criticizing this movie complain about how boring and vacuous it is. Now, while I find myself agreeing with their sentiment, I also want to add: Valhalla Rising is not a case of "style over substance", as one prominent review here claims and many others echo. In my opinion, it is rather the absence of both.
I mentioned my expectations about this movie at the beginning, because even though I know many people consider it to be "slow and boring", a mere exercise in cinematographic style, in my opinion "style" done well, can lend a lot of substance to a film. The extremely sparse dialogue and slow pacing work very well in something like 2001 for example, or to a lesser degree, There Will Be Blood or The Master.
This movie though, is simply ugly. Yes, it was filmed on a low budget, but I feel like some of the shots an amateur could have done better on a modestly priced DSLR. I read that the director, Refn, is colorblind and that's his excuse to crush all the blacks and throw simply gross looking filters on badly looking footage to create an amateurish looking mess that should embarrass a youtube vlogger.
A few other questionable "stylistic" choices: The constant shaky cam did nothing to enhance the scenes and compositions and just additionally gave the whole production a feel of unpreparedness and it being the result of arbitrary artistic choices. During the entire part shot "on the boat" I felt like I was watching a school-play being filmed, where a bunch of mediocre actors sat on some Viking-ship museum's exhibit placed on a stage with the fog machine cranked up to the maximum and cheesy orange light filtering through. Sound effects seemed to be ripped off youtube and weren't always synced well. Horrid "blood spatter" effects were just thrown onto the footage - seriously, like someone googled "blood stain", took the first .png result and superimposed it over the footage.
The reason I'm going on and on about this is not to prove what an observant clever viewer I am, but to show that this movie being called a "visual feast/spectacle" is a bizarre, misguided rumor. This movie looks like sh*t, almost shot for shot. Which completely makes any sort of immersion impossible if you're someone who notices such things.
But the visual narrative is the only thing this movie has going for itself, seeing, as you've probably read in many places, that it has almost no dialogue or straightforward plot-motivation for its cast of indistinct characters.
So, sadly, I got absolutely nothing out of this movie. The reason I'm giving it more than 1 star is that I very much respect a director pursing his vision. It's no easy feat to make any movie, especially one as unconventional and hard to digest like this. But my respect is limited,seeing that it just fails in many regards that could have been done much better, even with the limited budget it had.
Nirvanna the Band the Show (2016)
Comedic genius with low-key exterior - Give this show a chance!
I first heard about "Nirvana the Band" a few months back and while it seemed somewhat interesting, its sort of bland look kept me from checking it out. Now that I've come through and watched all episodes, I have to say that I never laughed so hard at any show in the last 1 or 2 years.
For me, the lack of flashy presentation and stylized look turns out to actually not be a shortcoming but something that really helps to sell the humor the show is going for. Somehow, the low-fi aesthetic makes it feel more authentic and really facilitates the seamless blend of scripted scenes and "prank" like improvisation that's going on all the time. If you look closer at how the episodes are put together, you begin to realize that this "homemade" quality is an aesthetic choice and the editing and planing that has to go into creating it must be enormous. But the hard work pays off 100%.
The biggest compliment I can give "Nirvana The Band" is that its style of comedy at the moment feels completely fresh, like nothing I've ever seen before. And -most importantly- it feels not only "new", it also really works. The guys embody their characters so completely that nothing ever feels "acted" and the ideas that drive the "plot" are so surreal and insane that I cannot even begin to imagine how they manage to come up with them.
This is the best new show I've discovered in 2017 so far, I really hope that it eventually gets the audience it deserves! My guess as to why it has been mostly overlooked, is not that it is "too weird" (Compared with, for example, something like the Eric Andre Show), but rather that it sort of defies the comedic fashions and stylistic devices of the time. It's completely its own thing- which sounds vague and meaningless, but if you've watched it you'll certainly see what I mean!
Amanda Knox (2016)
Captivating and quite disturbing
I watched this completely spontaneously yesterday, without knowing what precisely it was about. Expecting nothing special, I can now say that I was very pleasantly surprised. Aside from what seemed to me a very on- the-nose way of building up tension at the beginning that had me rolling my eyes a bit (I expect someone who knows even a bit about the case would react very differently), this is a very solid documentary.
As I see it, the most interesting aspects of this story are not the intricacies of the murder case itself- the collection and interpretation of clues and such. It quickly becomes more about how the media reacts to an "exotic" case (or is trying its hardest to make it exotic) like this and how it impacts the workings of a possibly incompetent police- and justice-system. I believe this was the decided intention of the makers of this documentary: They manage to pretty elegantly blend the human angle (the immediate experience of those involved in the case), the 'mystery angle' (uncovering what actually happened) and the bigger picture of how hyperbolic, borderline insane reporting on a case can shift the public opinion and potentially derail investigations in a very real way. The cinematography and editing are also excellently executed - the shots are stylish, but also convey information relevant to what's going on (as opposed to being vacuously flashy, as I've often seen in crime-related documentaries).
Regarding the 1-star reviews (this may contain a few "spoilers"): I'm glad I didn't decide to not watch the film because of the many angry negative reviews here on IMDb. A cursory reading of most of them makes apparent that the criticism isn't really focused on the craftsmanship or the entertainment-value of this documentary but rather on a bias the filmmakers may or may not have towards displaying the titular Amanda Knox in a much more positive light than she deserves. If this really were the case, it would constitute a valid criticism, given that this is a documentary. But from what I've read the accusations made in these reviews are far from substantial and most of the people making them seem to have been deeply emotionally caught up in this case for years and obviously made up their mind a long time ago.
For example, I've read multiple times that the documentary supposedly withheld "important" information, like the captioning of a myspace photo of Amanda holding a gun with the words "The Nazi Inside", or that the she once uploaded a short story of a woman getting raped, somewhere online. These reviewers apparently believe that this is damming evidence of her being a murderous sociopath. I'm baffled by this reasoning - it implies that every edgy teen on 4chan or reddit is an enormous danger to society.
Regardless - even if after watching the documentary you are not convinced of Knox' innocence, the repeated revisions of the verdicts made by the Italian courts plainly show that this case was handled extremely incompetently, which in and of itself is worthy of reflection and discussion. I will concede that the way some people, especially Italian investigators and lawyers, were presented made them look like morons, or at least somewhat misguided - but I'm not sure how much of this can be attributed to the makers of the documentary trying to paint a false picture. I had the impression that what I got was a somewhat exaggerated, but essentially real picture of who these characters were.
Anyways, a documentary well worth your time, especially as it brutally demonstrates the irrational malleability of public opinion - and this is true whether you consider Amanda guilty or not after having seen it.
Edit: The reviews here are obviously being brigaded by people who dislike this film with a passion. Very detailed and well written positive reviews (not necessarily mine) that gave the movie a score of seven or higher have been overwhelmingly declared "not helpful" in spite of the movie having a pretty high rating here.
Fargo (2014)
cheap thrills
I deeply regret having watched the entire season of this series. It seemed promising at first: The pilot was rather good and the next few episodes were as well- they did a great job at building up tension and after some point I just really (!) wanted to know what would happen next. But that's basically the only thing Fargo did right. After some episodes, it quickly becomes evident, that this series is completely empty at its core: From the beginning the plot doesn't make all that much sense and the longer it continues the more arbitrary and implausible it get's, it's like you can palpably feel the screenwriters making up arbitrary sh*t as they go along. While the overarching narrative in the end turns out to be a more or less protracted sequence of random events, single scenes were always completely predictable. In fact I have rarely seen such lazy, transparent writing in TV-series (I don't watch all that many, though). To clarify what I mean, take for example the villain: I'm not going to talk about anything specific he does here, but let's just say, that after the first episodes showed you how he goes about his evil business, you know for certain that this character will succeed at everything he does. He's practically set up as a god- he can do whatever he wants and will get away with it. And while he is the most entertaining character in the series this game of him doing something outlandishly brutal without facing any consequences get's shallow and predictable pretty fast. It's like watching a dumbed- down 10 hour version of No Country for Old Men without the excellent cinematography. Lester, another important character, is completely the opposite: Whenever he does something, we suspect that he will screw up. And the series teases us with this: So there are dozens of lengthy scenes were we see Lester sneaking around or the like, trying to bring us to the edge of our seat at the prospect that he'll maybe get caught. It worked the first few times- but it get's repeated all of the time (!) throughout the series and I found myself skipping a few seconds now and then, because I knew nothing would happen to Lester yet, but that the director just wanted to create tension by repeating the same aforementioned worn out formula. I talked about the story being essentially a sequence of random events and briefly want to get back to that: Namely that he major catalyst of everything that is happening in Fargo is basically the utter stupidity of various characters in the series. Crimes simply don't get solved, because police are too stupid and lazy. We just have to accept that. Characters put their lives on the line because they repeatedly act insanely stupid. And we also just have to accept that. You can just see the invisible strings attached to everything that happens in this series- everything is obviously artificial and could never occur like this. And just to be clear- I don't inherently have problems with "unrealistic" events in films and TV-series (if that were so, I couldn't watch any) but one has to draw a line somewhere. Here it's like the action scenes in many blockbuster-movies: You see the protagonist whirling around, beating up dozens of bad guys simultaneously, all the while defying the laws of physics and maybe dropping a few cool one-liners. Quickly you'll realize: "Nothing will happen to this guy, because the screenplay says so." That's kind of the feeling I had watching Fargo. People got away with things they couldn't possibly get away with all the time; people acted like no real person would ever act. What happened didn't happen for any comprehensible reason or because it seemed logical- what happened in one episode did so just to provide a segue into the next. So even though I really watched all 10 episodes I got nothing from that except many cheap thrills peppered throughout the giant plot- hole this entire series is. Fargo is as vacuous as it gets, I really wasted my time on this one- hope you don't waste yours.
Batoru rowaiaru (2000)
Ridiculous (II)
Literally- I burst into laughter about five times or more while watching this pathos-laden farce.
I had already expected it to be a bit trashy, given its premise, but also having had a peek at its visual style etc., but assumed that there would be some facets to it that could compensate for that.
There were none, of course, it turned out to be just a really, unbelievably bad and more than that, monumentally overrated movie. I don't understand how someone with an iota of intelligence and good taste (dangerous notion, I know) could find any second of this clownish, insipid construct thought-provoking or worth to be taken seriously. And I really tried, but just found myself confronted with a continuous stream of badness.
I realize there's not much substance to my criticism, but I just don't know were to start, so I rather won't altogether. This is just a warning, I won't expound all the idiocy to be found in this movie.
Just one little thing: Being curious about what people could possibly see in this embarrassing monument to incompetence, I looked up its wiki-article. There was one part about it being a "maximalist satire of the modern education system" and other allegories and metaphors, that could maybe be hidden within the stupidity that permeates every infinitesimal interval of this film-
-well, there are no "metaphors" in any conventional sense. People can associate many things with many other things: I for example associate "Battle Royale" with a blind man feeling around his rectum and converting the bumps he's sensing into a screenplay. That doesn't mean, that "Battle Royale" can take the credit for this ingenious association. It is just a meaningless heap of ridiculously unbelievable and inconsequential pathos and irrationality (and bad craftsmanship as well as acting).
If it's supposed to have any deeper meaning -which would be ever so sad- it got diluted and ultimately destroyed -got its head chopped of and then blown up by a grenade, actually- by its own unfathomable badness.
PS: If anyone wonders: I'm not offended or grossed out by the violence or whatever. It's just a seriously bad movie.
Looper (2012)
Embarrassingly ill conceived
As it is often the case, this movie's badness itself didn't really stun me to any serious degree- rather did the praises and loads of positive reviews it received.
In my eyes, as can be easily deduced from the rating I gave it, the film wasn't anything critics promised. Rather than being clever and intelligent about the time travel premise, the writer/director didn't seem to deem it necessary in any way, to waste one thought about what is relatively plausible and what utter idiocy.
I will assume that the reader has already seen the movie and therefore take for granted that she or he has the plot still in mind. I also won't give a comprehensive list of plot flaws, as many other users have done, i.e.: pointing out the fact that it's plainly unbelievable that time- travel should be used by some criminals to dispose of bodies . Such "little" flaws maybe could have been acceptable, or even gone unnoticed, if the central element of the story wasn't a giant singularity of writer-stupidity.
In order to see this, we have to consider some vitals segments of the course of the plot. The passage I have in mind isn't really shown linearly and continuously in the film- maybe the director tried to draw the viewer's attention away from the completely illogical structure of the narrative:
At first, we see our protagonist Joe (1) standing in the field, that is his murderous workplace, waiting for a victim to appear. Then, of course, Joe (2) from the future arrives (without the standard victim's apparel: his head is exposed), overwhelms his younger ego and escapes. The younger guy wakes up some time later and heads to his apartment, where he fights some goons and in the process gets thrown off the balcony. After that, there's the above alluded to inexplicable break in the narrative, which I at first interpreted as a stylistic device.
The screen blackens. Later we see young Joe- standing in his field again, exactly as before. Again, Joe-from-the-future appears- but this time only to get shot down helplessly by his younger self (he has his face covered, in this scenario). We see young Joe (Levitt) getting transformed into old Joe (Bruce), who after 30 years is sent back to be killed.
This old Joe (Bruce) manages to break the loop and escape his younger self. The plot then continues at the point where the screen faded to black before.
So what happened here? The "old Joe" (Willis) managed to avoid his execution, therefore "breaking the loop". But this "old Joe" (Willis), in his youth, managed to kill his older self. Actually the only way it was possible for the "old Joe" to become the "old Joe" he is, was to kill his (then) older self, when he was still young. Therefore by "escaping" the execution through his younger-self, he (Willis) already completely annihilates himself.
To generalize this explanation: The older Joe depicted by Willis, after having escaped, necessarily must now have a different past than the young Joe depicted by Levitt. Because when the now old Joe, was still a young Joe, his respective old Joe, did not survive. So the Joes, that are the movies protagonists, cannot be identical. (Nothing that interacts with a temporally displaced version of itself can be the very same thing it interacts with) There is a section of their lives (namely: the execution on the field) that is temporally the same, but not structurally. The causal link between young and old Joe is completely ruptured at this point.
And this, my friends, is an utter outrage: The premise of much of the movie is an error in thought. There is no way, young and old Joe could coexist.
The ending later, again, is a cheap bluff: Young Joe "realizes" that a temporal-causal loop will always lead to the uprising of the rainmaker and his murderous spree in the future (this of course is nonsense- there is no real loop present in the film, as I went at lengths explaining above; it's more of a causally incoherent, fragmented spiral
or something). Because he wants to prevent the telekinesis child from becoming the Rainmaker, he kills himself, so that his older Willis-self won't be able to kill the child's mother, as this would lead to the child becoming a sociopathic sorcerer.
As young Joe thus dies by his own hand, old Joe obviously immediately disappears. Apart from that nothing else happens. Mother and child (not so) merrily cruise away.
But let's remind ourselves: Young Joe is only in that field, because he had to confront the old Joe. But the old Joe's existence, as it happens, is already, and always has been, terminated because of his younger versions suicide. So the younger version never having been confronted with angry old Joe never had any reason to walk into a field and kill himself there. So how then could mother and child have gotten into this field, let alone, how could they have even seen the older Joe (who never existed)? etc.
Does this sound familiar? Yes: It's actually a slightly different version of the grandfather paradox. Instead of murdering his own grandfather and therefore cancelling his own existence instantly and trough all time, making the murder itself impossible, young Joe is compelled to kill himself, by the arrival of his older self, which could have never existed because he killed himself still a young man. The old Joe is necessary for the young Joes decision to kill himself. But this exact action makes its own cause impossible.
Interestingly, this is what Roger Ebert has to say about the ending: "This film leads to a startling conclusion that wipes out the story's paradoxes so neatly it's as if it never happened." Well said sir, well said.