Nicolas Cage’s Paul Mathews begins the film giving a lecture on zebras camouflage. He points out that while alone, a zebra becomes a magnified target for its prey. When mixed into a group, he blends in due to the similarity it shares with the other zebras. It has no distinguishable traits.

This lecture is the theme of the film. Being ordinary is better than famous.

Cage character, however, hates being ordinary. The irony of him teaching this lesson is that if he could, he would give anything to become respected, famous, revered: the lone zebra. It’s clear whatever hopes he had for his life while a doctoral student never came to fruition, as his piers went on to make a name for themselves.

He is a petty, jealous, and self-centered character who at first is quite pitiful. It’s almost cute how this ordinary man sees himself as so extraordinary.

Yet once he begins to appear in thousands of people’s dreams, he becomes utterly irredeemable. The scenario of the film magnifies his negative qualities and shrinks any positive qualities he had originally.

In one pivotal scene, after the dreams turn to nightmares and Mathews becomes the ire of the cultural zeitgeist, he crafts an apology video in an attempt to save his image. The filmmakers zoom in on his bookshelf, where a photo of a single zebra is prominently displayed.

This photo represents where Mathews is in the story, isolated and clearly visible to a wider world, easy prey. To no surprise, this video he creates only makes things worse, as the lone zebra only makes himself more visible.

Choosing the correct protagonist can oftentimes be difficult for high concept films. A lot of beginner screenwriters, of which I count myself, have trouble with making their protagonist interesting. What Dream Scenario does so well is it pairs a film concept that is in opposition to a characters fatal flaw.

Paul Mathews’ want is to be famous; his need is to find self motivation and not hold others accountable for his shortcomings. By giving him his want so easily, the film creates a negative growth journey.

Dream scenario is an excellent example of a script written with the fundamentals of story and character in mind.

This week, as a 40something year old man, I only finally got around to watching the original Swayze-starring film, and then quickly followed it up with the Liman/Gyllenhall remake. And I enjoyed both quite a bit for what they are.

What I did not expect from either was how much these movies lift from the cowboy classic “Shane.” And it’s not a thing that I’ve seen any mention of in any of the light reading and podcast consumption I’ve done around these viewings, which is a bit of a surprise for me as well.

It’s very clear to me at least that both Swayze and Gyllenhall map to the titular Shane in how they are a reluctant figure capable of tremendous violence that drifts into a place and is forced into some action against a corrupt local figure of great resources/wealth. All versions here feature a ringer type henchman that the lead has to overcome. And all versions feature a side character that fanboys or fan girls over the lead. The character tension for all involved is whether that violence even when deployed to confront villainy only begets a movement to becoming a villain and less a hero.

I chuckled when I wrote to my brother after watching the original but before watching the update, that Roadhouse to me felt like Shane Meets Double Dragon. And then upon watching this update, I was tickled to see a side character comment on the Shane’ness of it all, without ever quite saying that name.

One of the most zen movies I've ever watched.

To me, the theme of this movie is perspective. The best scenes in this film to display perspective are: plants under UV lights appearing brownish (dead), while green (alive) under natural lighting. Hirayama eats at the same restaurant but at different tables. He drives along the same path while listening to different songs. He takes years of photographs at the same bench in the same park, visits the same bookstore but bought different books, goes to the same print store but chooses different photos etc. Everything appears different yet somehow the same. Now is now, next time is next time. As a Hong Konger, I found his character deeply connected to Shinto/Buddhism. We know Hirayama is at least spiritual, mindful of some religious practices, and gets plants (spirits) from the shrine. He finds happiness in every single detail. Alternatively, you can see him as Sisyphus, who finds contented acceptance in his situation, though without the punishment element and defiance of the gods. In fact, his life (or pretty much everyone’s life) is a cycle of happiness, unhappiness, misfortune, fortune, smiles, tears, ups, and downs. The annoyance of lending Takashi his car leads to a kiss; Takashi makes him go to the store, leading him to discover more cassettes he likes; Takashi ditching work leads to a more competent worker alongside him; reluctance to take Niko to work turns out to be one of the best things in his life. Whether you think it's darker when two shadows overlap, again, perspective.

I found alienation to be a side theme. Alienation, of course, stems from Marxist theory. In general, workers find no control over what they produce and have no idea what they are producing. These aspects are obviously not present in the film. However, one type of alienation that does resonate is social alienation, particularly close to the interpretation from Pun Ngai (one of my favorite anthropologists)'s work on female factory workers in China. These factory workers are disconnected from the larger society, as they are largely invisible and ignored by those outside the factory gates (toilet). More often than not, they are low-wage workers in sites of high society (capital cities like Beijing and Tokyo). The disconnection not only stems from their uniforms but also from the dirt and so-called germs on their skin, which makes locals distant from them, as when the mother cleans the kid’s hands after Hirayama rescues him. I quite admire how Korean and Japanese movies in recent years have approached such topics with ease, like the smell of the shadow family in Parasite, which somewhat resembles Pierre Bourdieu’s theory on taste (if anyone reading wants to know more, please comment). Hirayama is pretty much an alien to his family, the ignorance of every local he interacts with, and the fact that he mainly listens to Western music (only two Japanese songs in this movie, one sung by Mama) also make him an alien. Niko is an alien to her family, or at least she tries to be. Hirayama, in a way, admits this by saying, "The world is made up of small worlds; your mother and I are in different worlds." I don't think the idea of Marxist alienation comes back much in the movie, other than the contrast between the sky tree and the tree, which is quite interesting. Like his life revolves around trees, while his work life revolves around the sky tree.

Back to “perspective,” I love that every single character is not one-dimensional; everyone has their own story (like us). Hirayama has a history with his dad, Niko has difficulty connecting with her family, Mama is divorced, her former husband has cancer, and Aya's split with Takashi seemingly has more to it. There's also the sweet scene of Takashi’s ear hanging out with the kid, a different side of him from all his other stories. Hirayama is able to appreciate all of this because he lives in every single moment. Now is now, next time is next time. But after all, he is still a normal human being; he forgot which building that site was, even though it’s nearby.

The big question is whether Hirayama felt lonely. Throughout the movie, he constantly dreamt in black and white. If I recall correctly, the first dream is the word “shadow,” the second about Aya, the third about tic-tac-toe, the fourth about Niko riding a bicycle alongside him, the fifth about Mama singing, and the sixth about trees. So every one of them is about connection, other than the first one; the sixth should also be about connection since he replies to Niko that trees are his friends. The first dream is a maybe. This is obviously connected to the shadow tag story. With Hirayama photographing the trees all these years, I think he knows if the shadow is darker when shadows overlap. However, he also knows it is just perspective. So after all, it should be about connection? Anyway, in my eyes, he loves human connection despite usually rejecting it. He should feels lonely at times, but he is also content at times. As he is more spiritually aware of his surroundings, these emotions are all real while all in a cycle. Whether it is rainy or not, he still smiles toward the sky every day (because he's "Feeling Good"!). So why "Perfect Days"? The simplest answer is every day is a perfect day to Hirayama, so perfect days. Is there any significance that the song “Perfect Day” plays after Aya’s kiss? I don’t think so. Maybe in a more depressed way of seeing this, the song ends with “You just keep me hanging on,” which may indicate that Hirayama is depressed and that Aya’s kiss gave him some human touch he wants. But again, perspective. Hirayama is content in every way possible.

By the way, I mentioned this in my review of "Monster." I very much enjoy how Japanese movies use bicycles and cars. A bicycle is youthful, for leisure activity, while a car is for adults, for work. Even Niko leaving by car signals that. You see these symbols in "Shoplifters," "Monster," almost all Miyazaki movies, and "Perfect Days." And I just realized the credit song is "Perfect Day" (Piano Komorebi Version). Nice touch!

https://letterboxd.com/aaron156/film/perfect-days-2023/

I watched a black and white film years ago and want to show a specific scene to someone but cant remember the name. the scene in question takes place at a dinner table inside a house and is a montage style scene throughout the years. it starts with a man and woman who are newlyweds and are extremely happy together, happily married and talking at the table and laughing. it continues through the montage slowly showing them talking less and less. then the last scene (still at the same table) later in life they are not talking to each other at all and both are just reading the newspaper. completely disconnected. any thoughts?

I’ve been on a Mamet kick lately and gave Homicide a shot because it’s always recommended as a must watch Mamet movie.

But after finishing the film I was left asking more questions and feeling kinda confused. My questions are:

Why were we left hanging when the Jewish Organization reveals they have Photos of Bobby Gold bombing the Nazi building? What did he do to stop them releasing the pictures?

Was there sufficient reasoning given for Bobby Gold to commit so fervently to the Zionist organization? It just didn’t feel believable to me that he suddenly made the switch and was willing to bomb a building for them.

Was the police force at this time really so lax about the cases they assign their officers to? How is Bobby Gold allowed to play desperado jumping from case to case, while not sleeping.

These are the things that immediately standout, amongst other smaller details. All in all I just didn’t find it lived up to the hype.

Curious to know what everyone else thought?

I generally don’t like to investigate the content of films I’m about to watch because I don’t want tot come in with preconceived notions, it’s usually bound for disappointment. So I picked up a copy of Rocco and His Brothers, I’ve been a fan of Italian cinema for years and have loved The Leopard for many years. But I didn’t really know what I was getting into other than knowing that Visconti was such a formidable force in Italian cinema and cofounder of the Neorealist movement. Sometimes you get into a bit of a slump with films, often I’ll like many of the films I watch but it’s generally rare for me to be completely swept away with a film. This film absolutely did that for me, it was also the perfect time for me to see it because I’m currently about halfway through with Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamozov, and I was struck by the thematic similarities between them which I doubt was accidental. As my understanding is that Visconti’s film previous Rocco was an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s White Nights. This film was just such a heart wrenching and morally challenging one I can’t really get over it. So beautiful in its formal design and even more so with its confounding moral honesty. The fractured fraternal bonds and tragedy of two tortured minds in the form of Rocco and Simone was brilliantly emblematic of the clash between Christian principles and a question of practical justice and moral responsibility and left open for us to ponder, which was I think the most brilliant aspect of the film. Visconti isn’t looking for easy answers so much as he is forcing us to ask questions, which is a kind of honesty that I admire more than almost any other quality in an artist. I’d love to hear everyone else’s thoughts on this film.

I'm making an experimental short film which involves a lot of repetition and I'm trying to root the arc/ rhythm of the piece in something other than 'it builds to a climax and then there's a resolution' but rhythm is something I'm not great at - particularly I want the film to feel cyclical and repetitive, with a sudden break at the end where it frees itself from the repetitive cycle, any examples of something similar would be helpful (particularly if anyone knows of any diagrams like as I'm a very visual person and love being able to visualise rhythms in that way!)

Additionally, how would you describe/ visualise the narrative arc or rhythm of more free flowing, poetic, essayistic films? The film I'm making is also trying to follow this kind of feeling, but to me they often don't feel like they have a strong overall arching rhythm (but again I'm not great at recognising rhythm!)

Thanks!

Robert Wise's The Haunting has a load of great mirror shots. A novel adaptation, it revolves around the mental disintegration of the main character Eleanor - within a haunted house, leading to questions: is it her?/is it the house? Mirrors act as our and the House's eyes and as 'traps' throughout, framing Eleanor's relationship with other characters e.g. when they're getting along they all appear in reflections; when they're not she's alone in them.

There are for me two great mirror shots that relate to Eleanor's grasp on her identity/mental stability. The first is when she enters the house for the first time. She waits in the lobby and sets her luggage down to chat with the caretaker. She then bends to retrieve it, and catches her reflection in the waxed floor. She seems to reach for herself and not merely the luggage, seeking something intangible: who she is (she's been mistreated all her young life at home and its damaged her sense of independence as an adult) - great subtle thematic establishing shot.

Another shot begins distorted, a fish eye view of a hallway she's fleeing down in terror from the warping manifestations in the house/her mind. she's running toward the camera. Camera pans around and its revealed to have been pointed at a convex mirror the whole time. Great use of reflection cinematography to elicit her inner mind. recalls that shot from Contact. I could go on, the film is packed with mirror imagery, and "mirrors" the novel plot in interesting ways.

Edit: Love the feedback! Cinema is heaving with reflection :)

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I was on a Brian De Palma kick over the past year. And part of this was out of liking some of his films but most from a "what the fuck" kind of angle. IMO films like Raising Caine, Dressed to Kill and Body Double are not good films, but I do find them highly entertaining.

These movies all have a twist ending to them and all of them are bad twist endings honestly. Either they are taken from other movies (principally Psycho) or are just pure nonsense.

However, it might be my own nostalgia for the first Mission: Impossible film. But I actually think that nearly all of the twists work in that movie. From the Scream-like fake out of having the entire team killed off in the first 10 minutes, to the various traitors that Ethan has to deal with, it all works IMO. When I saw the film the first time I genuinely didn't see them coming, and upon rewatches, they do make sense and feel consistent with the narrative.

It's just kind of interesting to me that De Palma fancied himself this kind of new edgier Hitchcock at the time, but his attempts at doing twists like that just utterly failed until Mission: Impossible. It's no coincidence IMO that the films he wrote kind of failed on this level, while David Koepp who wrote MI was able to successfully write that. MI might be my favorite De Palma film, as he applies his style to it without all of his baggage.

What are your thoughts on De Palma's films and his use of twist endings?

Why is Freundlich in his "Stalker"? Alice Freundlich is a wonderful actress, but she's completely non-Tarkovsky, she's even anti-Tarkovsky. Why did the master take her to this movie? Many Soviet actresses would have played no worse than her.

The most obvious thing is that Alice Freundlich is really a wonderful actress. She has a characteristic Dutch-German face, which will organically fit into the picture of the corresponding period of painting of the "life — suffering" style. Freundlich played the Stalker's wife's monologue very powerfully. One of the most memorable moments of the film, however, may be a consequence of the overall illusory and meditative nature of the film. But there were other "points of concentration" in the "fog", but this one is remembered.

Or maybe this is exactly the image that Takovsky needed, breaking out of the general style of his mundanity. Such a very simple, confused aunt, not very smart, not very beautiful, very unhappy. Her husband has whistled far into philosophical distances, and she needs to somehow rake out in reality, and even take her hero home extinguished.

And by this discrepancy, she corresponds to the film.

Has anyone else been interested in this image?

I just watched this film a few days ago and am eager to discuss the formal techniques the filmmakers employed to make it feel period-authentic and how some of those decisions betrayed the aesthetic. Curious to hear what others think! Here’s my review:

“The medium is the message” is scarcely ever more apparent than in found-footage horror films. In the ideal found-footage film, the idea that what is being captured is simply what transpires before the cameraperson and not the machination of external drivers like a script or a rehearsed line is essential. That is to say, the essence of found-footage is its raw integrity. Found-footage should be as organic as possible, with certain caveats. For example, “found-footage” is something of a misnomer in the case of its most famous progenitor, The Blair Witch Project. It would probably be more accurate to label it, “miraculously-found-and-meticulously-edited-footage,” owing to the master tape's unrecoverable final resting place and its only mostly organic presentation.

Ghostwatch sidesteps these issues of credibility by purporting to be a live broadcast curated in real-time by television professionals. Many of its characters are portrayed by actual television presenters who are masters of the sort of cadence and candor with which audiences are acquainted. That the events it depicts were filmed, cut together, and recovered afterward does not stretch the viewer’s belief.

Late Night with the Devil would seem to benefit from a similar advantage as its phantasmagoric predecessor, yet its directors Colin and Cameron Cairnes opt to shatter the illusion through a series of ineffable creative decisions. First, rather than present the film as a master of the original aired broadcast, the Brothers Cairnes employ Michael Ironside to narrate a documentary-style foreword that sets both the setting and scene for David Dastmalchian’s tortured late-night host. This mockumentary format bookends only the front end of the film, disappearing completely upon the start of the narrative proper. This gimmick – for want of a better term; “framing device” seems too charitable given its fleetingness – allows the storytellers to present black-and-white BTS footage to be stitched in during the broadcast’s commercial breaks, forcing an excruciatingly condescending level of backstory into what would otherwise be an impenetrable occult narrative.

Despite their reputation – or maybe because of it – subtlety goes a long way in found-footage films. An in situ media artifact allows the storytellers to play fast and loose with conventional narrative techniques; characterization fades to the midground as off-camera interactions and histories circumspect the outer bounds of whatever peculiar situation the characters find themselves in. It gives the piece life, inviting interpretation and puzzlement as the viewer intuits what it is they are watching. It’s found-footage, right? The viewer takes the mantle of an archeologist, in a way. Confusion is the rule, not the exception.

Which is why it’s disappointing that the Brothers Cairnes supersede this uncertainty – in a story about moral confusion à la Faustian bargains and demonic possessions, no less – in favor of holding the viewer’s hand through the BTS drama of Delroy and his companions. It’s not as though the talk-show format and themes of industry exploitation are so foreign that they otherwise demand a firm grounding in the familiar. The idea of piecing together the man behind the anthracite eye-sockets of Jack Delroy is too tantalizing, to say nothing of how every other plot point and character beat of this well-intentioned artifact is agonizingly spelled out.

Narratively, it’s an affront, but more importantly, it betrays the aesthetic conceit of the subgenre. The bases were loaded, too. Late Night needs two things: it needs to be slower, and it needs to be more boring. Genuinely. Trust the viewer to intuit the character of Delroy, his faux showmanship, his uncanny, staged trappings. And allow the explosive finale to truly come out of nowhere – except thematically.

Simply, a film presenting itself as an artifact should behave as one.

I remember seeing the trailer to Precious many moons ago at a screening for Madea Goes to Jail, which I was brought to against my will. Seemingly every Black person in Central Florida was there and many of them actually thought Precious was a straight up Tyler Perry production. You can't really blame them since on paper Precious is right up his alley thematically. I ended up seeing the film and while everyone else volleyed between sorrow and disgust, I thought it was one of the most brilliant comedies I had seen in a very long time. I did not get why people were crying. This is a satire right? I've seen enough of Lee Daniels' work to know that he greatly enjoys using camp to make a point. If you watch the first few seasons of Empire you'll get my point the exact nanosecond Cookie shows up. But at the time, most audiences took the film for face value and it pretty much killed any appetite for this film overnight. Urban dramas or Hood Films had been dwindling in both production and popularity but they hadn't entirely died yet by 2009. Precious in many respects was the last nail in the coffin for the Hood Film having any mainstream popularity or even much popularity in its own community. One could argue that Tyler Perry took most of the same themes and just repackaged them in a more pious presentation. Precious definitely had an effect on how his work was perceived but I get more into that in his write-up which is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/s/ySX51U85vL

It's important to clarify the differences between Lee Daniels and Tyler Perry because the two do get compared a lot. Both make female focused dramas largely targeted towards the Black community. Both engage in some harmful stereotypes in their work, Lee in particular loves the tragic Black mother trope. Both are producer-directors who have a very identifiable style although Lee is the closest one out of the two who is anything resembling an auteur. The key difference is that Lee Daniels understands the language of cinema. The man definitely has an eye for captivating visuals. He knows how to get good performances out of his actors. The production value in his work is always fantastic. He's a very good director. He's is a bad writer and no amount of good directing can overcome a bad script. He's also not great at picking scripts if the bulk of his filmography is any indication. He didn't write Precious and the fact that's a cohesive film that doesn't have fiftyleven different things going on makes that fact very obvious. Please watch The Paperboy if you'd like a firmer illustration of what I mean. It's unhinged in the best way and I get a kick out of it. Because Lee Daniels understands how film works, and seems to have a thing for period pieces, he knows how to use that knowledge to make commentary on the medium itself. Precious imagines her ideal self as a blonde white girl and we get this information entirely non-verbally with her visualizing herself in the mirror that way. He has Precious prounce around like Diana Ross in her fantasies to impress her imaginary boyfriend Light Skinned Biracial Pretty-Boy No# 25706, although it was 2009 so maybe he was the model after they perfected Corbin Bleu. He uses Telenovelas to help Precious express her emotions in a way only slightly more dramatic than the film proper. He creates a New York that feels gritty, unforgiving, brutal and you understand entirely how a place like this could produce Precious. At the same time, his presentation of all these things and more is so campy and over the top, you can't help but wonder if he's taking the piss out of you.

A perfect example is the scene with Mary in the welfare office. In-universe, she is trying to garner sympathy from Mrs. Weiss and not lose her check. It makes sense narratively why she is acting the way she does. But in practice, it's almost vaudevillian. Her face is white, she's blubbering the whole time, her speech ranges from heart wrenching to insane with very little transition--it's pure camp. Mo'inque delivers her finest comedic performance in this film. She is insulting Precious with well timed quips. Her moments of physical abuse are so over the top and burlesque that it almost reminded me of a John Waters film. Even her body language and facial expressions are pushed to the utmost level. She doesn't just glare at Precious. She stares daggers straight into her soul. She doesn't corner the girl. She stalks and circles her as if her own daughter is prey. She's the best part in a movie that is already pretty solid. Camp thrives on delighting in bad taste and Mo'inque is swimming it in here. If one could change up the music and the lighting, they'd be forgiven for thinking these were deleted scenes from The Parkers.

On that note, Precious is one of the all time great film characters. Yes she suffers a lot, almost to cartoonish proportions, but she also exercises agency. She's the one who tries to learn to read. She's the one who reports her mother to the feds. She's the one who decides to leave and start a new life. She's the one who takes the chicken. That scene, funny as it may be, is actually pretty pivotal. You see her think about it, she's planning it out. The wheels are turning in her head. She takes it regardless of the consequences and runs away. She shows us early on that despite her circumstances, she's ultimately not just a victim. She rejects the idea everyone has about her and who she should be. She resolves to be the one who changes her own life. This film gets compared to The Color Purple and they do share some thematic elements. The key difference is that Precious ultimately makes her own happy ending and Celie does not. She's also very funny at times and has a dry sense of humor to her that many characters in similar films never get to display. She suffers but she doesn't feel like an avatar for suffering only to be gawked with shaking tisking heads.

Precious as a character feels like a response to the type of characterization that women who look like her tend to get in a lot of Black media, especially at that time. But more broadly, Precious as a film is a distortion, subversion and dissection of the misery porn/Hood Films that dominated Black media for a while. For one, it's a female led narrative which you'd think would be more common but this flavor of film was often from the male perspective. The hurt and damage the male characters inflict on women in those films is still from that point of view. Rarely do the women get to express their opinions or pain in a way that gives them an inner life. Black women are raped, beaten, pimped out, drugged out and in some cases killed in a lot of these films. In Precious, the men do not matter. Yes, one kicks off the plot and the characters do discuss the impact on men in their lives. But nearly every consequential character shown onscreen is a woman. The relationships Precious builds are with other women. Even the abuse we see onscreen is largely done by a woman. Precious does have a lot of anxiety as it regards men and her attractiveness to them but that is largely something she overcomes by the end. In any other film like this, most of these women are side characters at best. Here they get to control the narrative.

The absolutely dismal state of a good chunk of the characters is outlandishly overdone that you can't help but laugh. Here's a thought exercise: imagine that this story about a Black morbidly obese, illiterate, HIV positive two time teen mom abused by her own alcoholic, obese, uneducated mother who envied her infant daughter for being lusted by her father was written and directed by a white guy. Takes on a completely different tone, doesn't it? I actually told my roommate who is white that the director was named Ari Sapperstein and he told me that this was one of the most deeply racist films he had ever seen. I did tell him the truth but the fact that the maudlin levels of poverty, abuse and overall misery the characters endure feels like the work of a white writer who was trying to capture their idea of Black inner city life. The New York portrayed in this film isn't the hustlers' playground or an urban jungle full of opportunities for a hungry nigga with a dream. It's not overly dark to the point of seeming out of this world either. The stark lighting feels like a spotlight. Precious doesn't come home to a ghetto filled with colorful characters. The neighbors largely ignore her when she's being abused and she doesn't make friends until she's in what's essentially a remedial school. Mary isn't a long suffering mother character hoping her baby can get out of the hood. She's a product of an environment that itself is a product of a failure on the part of our society. The book plays all of this completely straight and in my opinion is much harder to get through than the movie.

If you're somewhat media literate, then you can see the dark comedy elements in the film. Even Lee Daniels thinks of it as a comedy. Mo'inque had a hard time getting through some of her monologues because she was laughing too much. They apparently had a hell of a good time making and I wonder if they ever thought it'd get this far. But most audiences took the film entirely seriously and I think that's what nixed the desire for anything else like this. Similar to when The Color Purple premiered, Black audiences were somewhat divided. Many felt that the film was so extreme it was almost unwatchable. As I said, the film paints an almost parodic depiction of inner city and the obstacles Precious endures especially THAT scene where Mary asks her a 'favor' could be too much for people to stomach. I think it's worth considering the context in which the film was released. Precious came out in 2009 the same year Barack Obama became president. Black Americans had a sense of hope for the future for the first time since probably the 60's with the signing of the Civil Rights Act. There was this feeling we had 'made it' and that assimilation and integration groups like the Italians, Irish, Jews and so on had experienced would finally happen to us. A film like Precious which on the surface dealt with very regressive and offensive depictions of Black womanhood and Black family life was considered gauche. Our president is Black and our Lambo is blue. Black Americans wanted media that spoke to JaQuan making six figures a year in Atlanta as much as it did Sharonda struggling on welfare in The Bronx. This is also why during the early to mid 2010's you saw an increase in comedies about the Black community largely removed from real world issues, think Girls Trip or Think Like a Man.

Precious showed Black audiences exactly what they had been watching for twenty years at that point and they were not pleased. Lee Daniels basically said 'damn, y'all like this shit forreal?' for two hours. Is there much daylight between something like Precious and Baby Boy? Not really. I think the comedic angle definitely played a part in people's perceptions of the film. I wouldn't say most people think of it as a comedy but it's so absurd in its drama and presentation that you can't help but laugh. Precious did its job so well that you really don't see this type of film anymore. If you do see films that wade into the misery porn waters, they tend to be indies and/or queer films. Moonlight is the closest thing I can think of and that film is decidedly not a comedy in any respect. If there are other films like Precious being produced then they aren't being widely released and not seen by wider audiences. Nothing like that has been nominated at the Oscars again except for Moonlight which itself feels like a response to the hypermasculinity of the 90's Hood Films.

The Hood Film didn't exactly go away but it shifted its approach and focus. American Gangster wasn't exactly revolutionary in its approach but it did make money and it elevated the Hood Film to the same operatic heights that films like The Godfather, Casino, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York and The Departed achieved. Ridley Scott isn't a flashy director but he's certainly a classy one. The Black protagonists and their world are portrayed with the same level of dignity and style all his other protagonists get. If Precious and Moonlight are responses to the Hood Film, then American Gangster was the refinement of it. It delved into the person of Frank Lucas and unpacked him in a way you rarely saw with Hood Films in the 90's. Power, Godfather of Harlem, Empire, P-Valley, BMF, The Family Business, Snowfall and so many others have followed in this path. The characters here are still drug dealers and criminals but now they present themselves as legitimate businessmen. These buttoned up slick mouthed characters get much more moments of pathos than their spiritual precedents ever did. We've moved on from the roughneck portrayals of Black men struggling in the hood to basically doing The Goodfellas but for the heavily melenated.

As the years go by, I think history will only be kinder to Precious. It has yet to achieve the status of 'problematic but classic' that The Color Purple, and honestly a lot of Black media, has attained. But people are revisiting both the film and their feelings on it. Precious is hard to watch not only because of the subject matter but because the subject matter is presented in a way that makes you uncomfortable and therefore forces you to analyze the themes in other films of that type. I think it deserves the same 'this film still holds up' type of adulation that much poorly constructed films get all the time. It's a hard watch at first but once you see everything Lee Daniels is playing with, it becomes a fun one.

I'm a Guardian writer (and modest film buff and physical media fan) who recently posted on Reddit asking to speak to physical media collectors for an article I was working on. The article was published this morning and I thought people here might be interested in it: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/mar/27/the-film-fans-who-refuse-to-surrender-to-streaming-one-day-youll-barter-bread-for-our-dvds

I'm posting it here partly for self-interested reasons (I'm hoping people read my piece!) but also because I wanted to follow up to thank the many people who reached out and offered to speak to me or shared pictures of their collections. So many people, in fact, that I wasn't able to talk to or even respond to all of them -- but please know that I truly appreciate it.

A lot of readers have already weighed in on the article in its comments section; I may return to this topic at some point in the future, so if you have any comments, I'd be happy to hear them, whether there, here, or by email. Again, I may not be able to respond to every message (or just be slow to respond) but I always try to read them. Thanks again.

A reoccurring aspect in Scorsese’s films is the aim to make you sympathize with very deeply flawed, even monstrous men.

Travis Bickle is a deeply unhinged and disturbed individual that’s also very strongly implied to be partially motivated by an underlying racism, pretty much the exact type you’d expect to end up as a mass shooter. Yet his loneliness and isolation is something easily relatable to many. Scorsese is utterly unflinching in his portrayal of Jake Lamotta as an abusive, violent, possessive mess of a man. Yet by depicting his life with such raw honesty, it’s a portrait of a sad and pitiful man that comes through whose inability to overcome his deep flaws can hit quite close to home for viewers. In his rise and fall movies like Goodfellas and Wolf of Wall Street, the sympathy comes from making the viewer get just as caught up in the allure of these lifestyles as their protagonist. Yet while these movies ultimately serve as a critique of these types of men, it’s also made very easy to see why someone would be seduced by that type of power in the first place.

There’s nothing sympathetic about Ernest Burkhartnor at least if there is, I found nothing. He has the basic human traits of loving his children and wife, and it’s questionable how much that’s even worth when he’s slowly poisoning her to death. There’s no rise and fall story for viewers to get caught in, the ugliness he’s depicted with is far too banal for it to ever be sympathetic, he’s just portrayed as an unadulterated scumbag. Is this the first time Scorsese has deemed his protagonist unworthy of sympathy? Are the historical injustices committed against the Osage people and other tribes so deplorable that he felt it wasn’t appropriate here?

From what I understand, computer editing was a thing in the 90s. How did they manage to get footage onto computers for this to happen? Surely they didn’t have sensors that could record decent footage, and I doubt the computer could hold anything decent.

I became curious after watching an IMAX documentary on 70mm. With imax on film theoretically having many times of the resolution of a 4k video, how is editing done using computers? Of course pre-computer editing would lose quality through any kind of scanning process as it would just be cut and stitched together then copied to other reels for distribution. Are they just scanned and then put back into film in 4k, with film grain smoothing out pixelation (which isn’t visible on digital projections anyway)? Furthermore, are older IMAX productions seen as higher quality, as they were never scanned?

My first thought when I watched the movie was that it was about questioning society and social norms. We as kids, are introduced to a way of thinking how things should be done. When we as kids do something that is frowned upon society, we get punished, an thought the "correct" way things work, but we never know why they are the "correct" ways. We just accept it as the truth with the time, and learn those ways to our kids, without questioning why we are doing it.

Bella is basically a kid, therfore she dosent have those predefined "truths". Just like a child, she dosent understand the problems with what she is doing, but since she technically is an adult, there is nobody capable of stopping her. She is free to do as she thinks is correct.

I think the part where this theme intensifies, is on the boat. In this part, they directly talk about how someone should behave. What to say, what not say, just for appealing to the social norms. Also, Bella questions Duncan on what the problem with sleeping with another man is. Bella dosent understand the concept of "cheating". When she ask him what the problem with some other licking her clit is, Duncan isn't capable of awnsering. He obviously feels cheated on, and therfore both angry and sad, but does he feel it because there is a reason why he dosent want his girlfriend to have sex with sother men, or is it because society has teached him that is cheating.

One More thing. I didn't really understand the finale. Would thank you id you explained to me. And sorry if the text is badly written. I'm tired now, so that probably the cause.

Spoiler warning!

I just saw it at the cinema and I'm quite confused/disturbed. I think it's a good movie, though. I was absorbed from the beginning and it was funny, too, like I expected.

The thing is that I wasn't laughing at the same things as everyone else. I primarily laughed at the obvious narcissism, or when he was obviously faking having feelings - I really liked Bale's acting. But I feel like I was the only one in the whole theatre laughing at those things...? And then the scene came where the prostitute was running from him in the murder-apartment. This was my first time watching it, I was shocked and I was wishing I had never seen it. Then the guy dropped the chainsaw and there was this shot of her bleeding to death on the floor. And THEN people laughed.

This just reminds me of those people who like Breaking Bad "for the wrong reasons." When I saw several groups of young men walk into the theatre, I thought "they must be here because of the internet hype" but now I'm just scared they might think murdering women is kind of funny.

I've been reading reviews on here so I know that it's social commentary on 80s hustle culture etc and that this was probably the director's vision. I'm just left with this icky feeling and was wondering what the deal is with the audience's reaction. What was your experience when watching? Can someone maybe explain to me if I have missed something? Or do you have any other thoughts/ideas?

Full disclosure: The technical elements of film are mostly beyond me, though I have some grasp of the basics. Maybe the best way to say it is: I read and mostly understood the famous Bordwell essay on Die Hard but terms like “rack focus” or techniques like blocking and revealing were unknown to me until I read it.

Anyway, I’m getting far afield already. I was watching Fritz Lang’s Ministry of Fear and there is a shot early on that I have seen a million times and yet it is always effective and I’d like to understand why.

It’s simple: We start fairly close to a closed door, which opens and Actor (in this case, Ray Milland) walks through. As they do and enter the room, the camera pulls back and swivels to reveal the rest of the space, tracking with the Actor.

Like I said, in a way, this wasn’t a particularly noteworthy shot. I’ve seen it many times. But its ubiquity can be explained, to my mind, because it so successfully sucks you into the action, makes you feel a part of it, even if it’s little more than deciding where to put the camera and then turning it. In a 1944 film, it still feels modern and vibrant.

But anyway, I’d love to hear from folks who do grasp the technical details and theory about why this kind of shot is so popular and so effective. I am always fascinated by those more mundane but still potent tricks of film that you will see put to use in many contexts.

When people discuss Apocalypse Now and Colonel Kurtz specifically they often focus on how he has gone insane which is true but there is so much more to it. What makes Kurtz and the whole film so fascinating is that Kurtz is right in many ways but still very much insane. Early in the film there is a short and forgettable moment when chef reads an article on Charles Manson and this was definitely included for a reason. Kurtz is very much like Manson, a cult leader whose philosophy is all about how to really win the war. He would not be able to have much power if he was just out of his mind, the truth is much that he believed was true and Kurtz was genius enough to manipulate people on all sides. He was able to sway Colby who also had a mission to kill him and seemed like he could have swayed Willard but decided not to.

Kurtz's philosophy focused mainly on the hypocrisy of the U.S army/military who in his eyes were the insane ones. And he was right in that they would never win the war the way it was going. Kurtz hated lies and of course the way the U.S forces ran the war was rampant with lies which we see in the film: building bridges just to say the path was open(leading to unncecessary killing), pretending to be helping ("cut them in half with a machine gun and give them a bandaid), making major decisions based on media coverage, charging a man with murder that was justified during a war and countless other examples. Colonel Kilgore seemed to enjoy the war too much, not taking it seriously and bombing a village while killing countless and risking the lives of his own men so that he can go surfing. But of course Kilgore was never charged with murder or reprimanded by the higher-ups because he was sticking with the program.

Kurtz believed that to win a war you had to be ruthless and "make a friend of horror". He saw that the vietcong were doing this but that the US army was only half way in and that the playboy bunny shows and beach BBQs were only making the soldiers care more about going home than winning. Again Kurtz was probably right here and losing the war proves it but at the same time Kurtz obviously went too far. He let his hatred consume him to the point that he lost control this is shown by his gluttony and barbarism (weight gain and the countless severed heads and hanged people in the compound).

So during Willard's journey upriver he learns as much as he can about Kurtz and begins to become swayed by Kurtz's viewpoint. He completely agrees with Kurtz's philosophy more and more. He starts to lose his cool more easily as the trip progresses becoming more and more hateful of the lies he sees. He prioritizes his mission above everything just like Kurtz would, and one of the most pivotal moments is when he he shoots the injured Vietnamese woman so that he can get on with his mission rather than waste time getting her help. It seems like Willard is bound to end up like Colby, another follower of Kurtz but when he arrives at the compound he sees the death and destruction of Kurtz's power and realizes that the colonel had gone too far. More importantly at this point in the story I think Kurtz himself has realized he has gone too far. Perhaps he could have brainwashed Willard (and certainly could have killed him) but he doesn't try. He wants to die and end what he started and sees that Willard understands him so would be the best possible option to "take the pain away" and also to tell the truth about who Kurtz was warts and all. Willard completes his mission and after his experience is able to resist the temptation of taking Kurtz's place and most likely spreads the message about Kurtz's insanity but also the US army's insanity and why they will lose the war. Kurtz leaves willard a message to ”exterminate them all”, something Kurtz would have no problem doing as it aligns with his philosophy and one of Willard's big choices and few actions of agency is to reject the cult leader and to leave the compound unharmed. In a way he sets the people there free.

From the beginning of the film Willard is lost and looking for some kind of answer on war and humanity. He builds up Kurtz into some kind of genius who can show him enlightenment and truth. But when he gets there it’s a disappointment. The bullshit officers in Nha Trang were right in a way too, Kurtz truly is insane. The officer says “things get confused out there” which is totally true and Willard finds out there is no truth. Everyone is full of shit or insane in some way. 

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Despite cinema being over 100 years old, the vast majority of audiences will not put up with confusion or unexplained (explicitly) themes, content, etc. I do want to make distinct the use of 'confused' I'm talking about is the kind that can be assuaged with contextual knowledge, discussion, analysis, or just a bit of faith in the artists behind the work. As opposed to a film being confusing because of poor production/script. Without a direct statement from the director explaining what it's supposed to be.

I just want to know what separates the people who can't feel a film was good while also saying they were confused by a lot of it. Since school and academia, I can acknowledge if there's information/knowledge that would enhance my understanding or emotional connection; I would argue most of what matters is that I can still 'tell' when watching something that genuine intent is there. It doesn't have to affect my enjoyment in itself; the other properties of a film as an experience aren't supposed to rely on it.

I would bring up as a recent example Seijun Suzuki's Taisho Trilogy. I watch all 3 of these and imo they are probably some of the most confusing films you could ever watch. A narrative flow appears nonexistent, and no character relationship, action, maybe even existence is set in stone. I am very acclimated to Japan and Japanese media, but this Taisho period is a blind spot. I could start to pick up on the 'ambience' of it and its historical positioning as I went through the trilogy. Now this is something that I could research out of interest before rewatching the Trilogy someday, and maybe it will enhance my enjoyment and even emotional connection to them. But I'd say I still liked all 3 movies. There are shots throughout that are absolutely genius, and though fractured I can deduce thematic ideas.

When I say these are confusing movies, I mean in a way that left me genuinely lost and confused in a lot of scenes from each film. His earlier work Branded to Kill could be confusing for a lot of people, but personally it made complete sense to me, and I love it as a 10/10. It's fractured and frenetic as well, but I felt much more familiar with the Yakuza/crime genre tropes woven into its DNA and know the multitude of 'crime-genre subversion' films that are their own genre at this point. So, would I absolutely love the Taisho trilogy if I knew Japanese period pieces, the Taisho era, and ghost stories better? That feeling of there being a 'DNA' of traditional storytelling feels even more amplified here, perhaps taking from all over elements of Eastern and Western culture and their subconsciouses.

(To get an idea of my perspective, David Lynch is an all-time favorite. I relate less to people who define his films as confusing because I have honestly never been 'confused' or baffled by his work. They feel like very comprehensible narratives that run through an emotional and imaginative line; I'd even say he is very forgiving to his viewers by explicitly communicating the ideas he wants you to hold onto. He just makes it arise more naturally than straightly expository dialogue)

But when I encounter films this confusing, I just don't immediately respond with animosity like I feel the majority of moviegoers do. I always differentiated cinema as an art form that holds strong in ambiguity and raw experience or emotion. I think it comes through even in confusion. I can hate a film that's abstract or confusing, by feeling bad filmmaking at its core; it's kind of the same way I would hate a traditional narrative film for its failures.

Personally, how do you interact with confusion at the movies? Do you see it as a chance for a film to grow or change in your mind over time, or is it too taxing to be put through? Why is it an instant turn-off, if you hate it?

I just rewatched The Thing (1982) and still had as a good a time as ever. It’s a classic, everyone loves it, I love it, good shit, great fx, broken record, great fx, great fx.

Though, one thing I did notice towards the end of the movie was that I wasn’t exactly clear on the layout of the base the movie takes place on. There was only a short steadycam shot near the end that sort of bridged some the connections each room and hallway had with each other. I was sort of disappointed that, even though essentially the entire movie takes place in one location, I didn’t feel like I understood the spaces within the base, like somehow they didn’t feel very cohesive. Where is the med bay in relevance to the rec room? Where is the kitchen in relevance to the kitchen? Is it actually just one long hallway with rooms attached or is it more than that? It’s not super clear to me. I’m sure I could go back and figure it out by skimming through the movie and focusing on it, but there have been movies I’ve seen that feel like it is understood without even paying mind to it. And that’s fun and impressive to me. It feels like you truly have been there yourself and can now relate even further to the environment.

I feel like being able to understand the spacial coherence in a movie’s location adds an extra layer of believability. It makes it just that much more memorable. I’m MOSTLY talking about movies set in one or a few locations. They have more time to explore and let the spaces sink in.

To add to this, it makes it more memorable and interesting when the filmmakers find new ways to shoot the same location while still maintaining the coherency. Rope (1948) for example. Very small space but it was shot and framed in a variety of ways that kept it from getting redundant.

Some examples of films I think have done this really well are

Barbarian (2022)

Black Narcissus (1947)

Sound of Music (1965)

Home Alone (1990)

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane (1962)

Dogville (2003) (lol yes I know but still)

Just a handful that stick out to me.

I guess idk what sort of discussions I’m trying to promote with this, more of an observation that I’ve been really tied up in after watching The Thing. Anyone notice this? Or have opinions on the topic? I feel like there could be something to add but idk what haha

I was SA'ed when I was a child and for years I felt absolutely powerless, or should I say, I felt like there was no sense of understanding from others or closure for me. It's a hard subject to tackle in film and it's often ham fisted. My experience was decades ago and there's no recourse for me. The "characters" in this film (based on the Boston Globe writers) are people who are not skeptical or cynical of the Catholic Church when they started investigating - they're taking the information as it's coming to them. There are establishment folks who are trying to coerce them to stop their story/investigation because they don't want to upset the status quo, but the more the Spotlight writers discover the harder they push towards resolution.

I cannot tell you how invigorating it is to watch this film as an SA survivor - you feel like they are fighting for you, because you feel like no one has been fighting for you. I watch this film every six months and I'm always absolutely memorized by not only the performances and the pace, but the honesty and bravery of this film. I mean, to go against the Catholic Church in Boston is no small feat. It's not a tour-de-force for Mark Ruffalo or Michael Keaton, it's a kind of reckoning of the human spirit. You can tell all the actors involved feel strongly about this and are the embodiment of absolute good. Hard working journalists who just want to uncover the truth.

I cry every fucking time when I watch this film. Especially the end scene, when they finally publish the article and they get inundated with hundreds and possibly thousands of phone calls from SA survivors of the Catholic Church - it's absolutely bone chilling and weirdly reassuring that we are not alone in this.

Amazing film.

First I want to say that the writers didn't mean to make it about envy, it was meant as a critic of the 1%, who don't deserve their position of power.

But I think the writers put more of themselves in the movie than they realised:

The sous chef who blow his brains out is them, the artist, giving his brain, his creation to souless rich producers who will suck its matter and never appreciate its sacrifice. The way the body was taken away like trash is them being sucked dry and dismissed like useless trash

The critic, with no talent of her own who can make or break a career but who is a vapid and empty egotestical narcissit, and the ass kisser magazine guy who can't get enough of her bulls*t

The social media influencer who consume and obsess but can never create art because they are talenless hacks ( I think they hate them the most given the character's ending)

The hatred of the rich white man was gratuitous but hey we are talking about liberal hollywood writers here, topple that white oppressive patriarchy

The hack actor who coast on making bad movies and making millions

The tech bros somehow, this one I don't know, a clumsy social commentary about corruption maybe?

They put a list of everyone they hate and think wronged them.

And finally the incredible genius, unparallaled, ununderstood chef, who embodies them in the movie, who gave so so much to these ungratful people, and received nothing to the point of becoming bitter and sad, losing even the joy of cooking, his life's passion.

The movie is clearly saying the 1% are useless hacks who don't deserve their priviledged position, it reeks of envy, if the writers were understood, if their art could be appreciated for what it is, if only they had the power these rich hacks have, they could cleanse the world, save it.

Notice the disdain for the masses, where the commoners are not even mentioned, because even if margot and the chef come from humble beginings, they elevated themselves, they worked hard and have the talent to get to a position were they can mix with the most important people and serve them, their complaint is that those people don't appreciate them for their true worth.

About the burger, its that even a common burger, given to a genius, can be elevated to a fine dining meal. Knowing that the chef is them... maybe they are saying that even slob made by them can turn into gold?

The movie say a lot about how westerners think, the envy, the jealousy, the ego, the narcissism, the movie is clumsy and the plot is half baked, half the movie could be cut and wouldn't change a thing to the plot, the actors were wasted, the first act drags on forever and doesn't make any point and the 3 act is ridiculously bad, the shock moment were out of place in a mostly slow paced boring movie about snub aholes, and whatever social commentary the movie was trying to say it was done a million times a millions times better by other movies for the last 40 years.

But it provide an interesting inside the psyche of the writers, my guess is its unintentional, but interesting non the less.

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Yorgos Lanthimos is probably my favorite working director, and seeing his rise to mainstream recognition and discussion is truly a fascinating case. Though this coincides with his branching out into bigger-budget, recognizable-by-Hollywood storylines, he remains a staunchly auteur director with content that is deeply established in the weirder reaches of film. Case in point, with Poor Things being propped up on the same stage as Barbie, a lot of people have been unprepared for the complicated, provocative approach to feminist ideas. But having seen all of Lanthimos' films leading up to Poor Things, I do want to narrow this post to what I found the most distinct jump this film makes in his oeuvre: the optimism.

The content in Poor Things actually reflects back on all of his previous work and feels partly like a retrospective, and showcase of the technical level Lanthimos is at right now. The first chapter of domestic captivity reflects Dogtooth, the scifi elements showing silly animals in particular stems from The Lobster, the look at science and mad doctors shares Killing of a Sacred Deer's critical lens, and the period piece with clashing elements (and specifically the dance scene) was used in The Favourite. Emma Stone as a lead is a recently established collaboration, and the cinematography is pushing the wide-lens, absurd elements that have been stretching along all his releases.

But if you know all of these previous films, you know they are cynical and pessimistic to an extreme. Characters are always captive physically and/or mentally by large constructs, and the films usually end with only a proposal of exiting 'the cave', and even then on a torturous note. But then we have Poor Things and Bella Baxter. The black & white first chapter is a much smaller part of this film. And from there we explode with the possibilities of the world, rendered in wide-eyed wonder and beauty. We can see that it is certainly more beholden to our own world with its cynicism and problems than Bella can at first. But I think Lanthimos wants us to learn from Bella, as much as we would like Bella to learn 'our' reality.

The center of the film is Bella's interaction with Harry, "The Cynic". And it felt to me like the part where Lanthimos was getting meta, metaphorically showing his mental interaction with the character. You could say his earlier films really aggressively beat their women characters with the dark worldview he has. There is a legitimate discussion to be had about where he lands as a male director who so often shows his abhorrence of subjugating power structures by subjecting female characters to it in an extreme way. But this self-awareness comes out with Harry, who forms an honest dialogue with Bella as they separate by being honest about how resentment fueled his harsh way of showing Bella the world below her privileged platform. The optimism of the story does depend on the well-off life Bella starts with, and I think does want us to be aware of that. But...

Poor Things is still relentlessly dedicated to optimism. It has an actual sense of adventure, which is such a leap for Lanthimos and a joy to see. I also see this in how I interpret the film as a sensory experience foremost, even more than any intellectual, feminist/socialist analysis. The production design, costumes, score, are all getting Oscars because god damn, everyone involved is going all out. But not just that, these elements really are the focus. As a film centered on a character with a clean slate, it commits to replicating the psychological state of a baby brain's attention and experiencing kinds of stimuli for the first time. The first shot of the film is a close-up of a stitched art piece on a wall. We then see that these stitching are on the walls of Bellas bedroom. We begin with the insular, close-up things of beauty that introduced Bella to her world. And this philosophy extends throughout the entire plot. Sensory experience takes up a much larger part of what this film is than his others, which can be peeled back and thought about for much longer and more complexly than Poor Things. Yet when I think about where this landed in his filmography, it's up there as possibly my 3rd favorite. It above all is one I want to rewatch soon and many times over. After only one viewing, I really want to have the newness of the plot take a backseat to gazing over all of the intricate artwork and detail filling every frame.

Ultimately, that ending is ambiguous to me. It's a 'take it or leave it' paradise when they are all together in their garden, enjoying a day of peace and harmony. Yeah, Bella didn't fix the world; there are still hangups to be had with how fully enfranchised, liberated, etc. she is. But she's reading a book as her final action. And she states that her goal is to positively impact the world. That's one person, that's all she is, that's all we are, to tackle the large-scale oppressions of the world. She's not done growing, but it looks to me like she is growing (in a garden, crazy), and that is the point and the optimism with which Lanthimos holds himself to.

As a first attempt at radical optimism, I do think the simplification of things and the requirement of Bella's financial/social status shielding her show that it doesn't come easily, or realistically, for Lanthimos. It's a surreal, hyper-stylized fantasy film where he tries it, after all. But also, he's said he had planned to adapt the book since he was first making films, so...as a trajectory, is he intentionally going to explore optimistic elements more or is a budget/opportunity thing for this one adapted work? I dunno. But following The Favourite, it does feel like he's been branching out with his accessibility and comedy to things that aren't strictly the blackest of jokes. He already has another one with Stone cooked up, so I'm excited to see if he marries his intricate screenwriting with his bigger productions in the future.

I rewatched Lynch’s Dune. Compared to the new Dune, it's both better and worse, but broadly speaking it left a much bigger impact on me.

It starts very well. It has a lot of exposition, but I don’t believe in blindly repeating that “show don’t tell” line. I think it works great. Starting with Irulan frames the story very well and makes sense. This is the story that needs exposition, and I think Lynch’s movie does a much better job setting the scene and the wider universe from the start than both of the new Dunes did.

Another exposition tool the movie uses is inner monologue. I realized how this became an outdated technique and I haven’t seen it in movies in ages. But I loved it here. It completely fits the story where everything is happening in the characters’ minds and what is shown is not what they think. It also adds to this trippy, dreamy atmosphere that only increases as the movie progresses.

There are so many great lines in the movie, from “"It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion" to “the sleeper must awaken” and "the spice must flow".

In comparison, Villeneuve is all about what’s happening, the action scenes, showing and not telling, the script is actually really bad, no one says one interesting thing in the whole two movies. To me, that will never be a better way of telling this story.

The visual comparison is hard. Like I said, the new Dune definitely is visual, it is technically of course much more advanced when compared to the old one. But really, I am not that into these “visually breathtaking” movies, I need them to be interesting. Really the most visually interesting new Dune gets for me is during Harkonnen scenes and Sardaukar in Dune 1. I mean, the visuals are competently done, but I’m talking about 2 almost 3 hour long movies where a lot of it feels like watching a commercial.

The old Dune is done by Lynch who in addition to a good script has his own crazy visual style, and although it suffers from some old computer graphic shit like the shields and some space scenes and scene transitions with laughable effects, most visuals are incredibly special. There’s so much that’s just bizarre and interesting that stayed in my head after watching, which I can’t say about the new Dunes

When it comes to characters, Lynch’s Dune in a much shorter running time produced many memorable characters. It’s a bit of a weird approach because I think a lot of people see a good character as someone who is very fleshed out and has a clear arc. A lot of characters in this movie don’t really have that, but instead are a mix of incredibly simple but with something very interesting to them. They feel like characters from a legend, where they’re determined by the role they play or a very specific trait. I can see why not everyone would like this, but to me, that’s fitting to the book where the themes surpass individuals.

On the other hand, Villeneuve reduces his focus to a few characters and their relationships, in a way that benefits nothing.

For example, when reading the books, one thing I never thought to myself was “I’d really love to experience more of Chani and their romance. If only more focus was given to her character”.

Lynch seems to agree, Chani is there and they fall in love, it all happens very fast with a lot of mental monologue and that's great because there are so many other characters more interesting than Chani and plots more interesting than a romantic relationship. She’s not even a bad character, she totally has the feel of a lover from a legend whose story is told on some grander scale.

Villeneuve on the other hand keeps “announcing” her through visions in Dune 1 which is stupid since she’s the least interesting storyline, and then makes her a contrarian to be interesting in Dune 2 which also does nothing for the story except that she gets pissy about pretty dumb issues to create personal drama and I guess get an identifiable personality and aspirations, no matter how uninteresting. The acting is also very bad here.

I’m mixed up about the Harkonnens. Villeneuve is visually interesting and deserves a lot of credit for the atmosphere he created with them. Lynch is more grotesque, they are more bizarre and eccentric to the point of ridiculousness, which matches the books but it’s not my main criteria of judgment. New movies give them more dignity and mystery which isn’t necessarily a bad approach, but in my opinion, fails on a bigger level when you consider their entire story. The style and the build-up are there, but then their actual story feels incredibly flat and the endings very unsatisfying. Feyd only shows up in Dune 2, is more honorable, and dies in a pretty unimpressive fight without Paul ever even giving him a thought. The Baron is visually extremely cool but there’s very little interesting about his character, and he also dies in an underwhelming way.

I think this serious and mysterious approach led to some cool-looking scenes but no substance. Lynch’s approach was much grosser in a fun way, and that line between sadistically evil and ridiculous worked better for how their stories ended.

It’s interesting that in Lynch’s Dune Paul’s first vision is of Feyd Rautha, only then of Chani, each speaking directly to Paul (compare that with nonstop visions of Chani walking on sand in Dune 1, what is a more interesting buildup? The one that leads to the final confrontation, or the one leading to a relationship?).

The movie builds up on his character from the start. Feyd maybe isn’t a very complex character but is more entertaining in this more corrupt version, and the final fight seems more consequential for these reasons.

Baron’s death in Villeneuve’s movie felt also pretty lame, just a normal quick revenge. And not just that, for all the stylistic build-up he got and his more reserved character portrayal, the fact that Harkonnens spent the whole Dune 2 losing and his embarrassing ending just doesn’t work. Villeneuve wants to make him more formidable but then the plot makes him just incompetent and disappointing, whereas Lynch’s deprived and ridiculous portrayal makes both of these aspects make sense together.

For a character who was so mysterious, it seemed like a more epic death was needed, whereas Dune’s baron’s murder by a toddler kind of really fits and with slightly better effects and some minor changes could have been even better.

I read countless comments that it’s good how Villeneuve handled Alia because an adult-brained killer toddler would look too ridiculous, but that just reinforces my point about his movie, it’s not able to places like that. Also, I completely disagree.

Alia is my favorite character in Dune and one of my favorite characters overall. Her life should be told correctly. I’m not saying Lynch’s version couldn’t have been executed better, but ultimately Alia killing her grandpa is much more significant than Paul killing him (and then killing Feyd right after without any good build-up from his side). Lynch wasn’t perfect but the face down between Paul and Feyd, and Alia and the Baron, is what made much more narrative sense. Of course, if you don’t know what Alia’s story will be you may not get it, but it’s the beginning of the most interesting individual storyline.

It’s also a bit dumb because acting like Paul and Jessica were only there for a few months before the final events doesn’t make sense.

Overall the old Dune wasn’t exactly doing any crazy character development but it managed to have so many memorable characters, whereas in the new Dune I had to remind myself if they even mentioned some characters because they left little to no impression.

Dune’s Lynch has a rushed second half, that isn’t all that bad, it feels dreamlike and like telling of a legend. But to be fair, a huge portion of the plot is skimmed through via narration which is a shame.

Then again the new Dunes put together had about 6h to tell the story and I don’t think they achieved much more with the time aside making it more tiring to watch.

As for the point of the books, I think Villeneuve didn’t do a bad job and the ending is relatively fitting since he clearly wants to follow with Messiah as pt 3. Lynch’s Dune has a comparatively happy ending.. At some point, Lynch goes on a personal trip and dismisses a lot of important points of the book. If I wasn’t judging based on the accuracy, it is a satisfying ending, but a lot was missed. I’d say Lynch’s Dune is great for people who read the books and aren’t looking to have the story explained to them, then there’s a lot in the movie that’s just Lynch and you can enjoy it.

Villeneuve will give people who didn’t read the books a much better understanding of the story, still with many flaws, but didn't give me anything especially interesting to add to my already existing thoughts and impressions about it.

Obviously, this is going to be a spoiler thread. I wanted to discuss the meaning of the ending. Specifically, I am interested in seeing what others think. In my opinion, Chance walking on water was an subconscious demonstration of defiance. If we free ourselves from the want of earthly desires, the over class can't truly own us. Yes, we will still be under them (hence the house towers above Chance) but they won't truly own us. Chance was a fool but we still could learn from him. "Life is a state of Mind".

1967 was peak Godard, so much so that it deserves its own designation as ¡967, salaud, ma année de vivre dangereusement! Just like that, in his iconic red-and-blue typeface flashing the Godardness of it all direct into your retina. 

1967 saw Two or Three Things I Know About Her, La Chinoise and Week-end (or Weekend without the stupid hyphen) plus three short segments in anthology films, from the deadly serious in Far from Vietnam and Love and Anger to the frankly goofy in The Oldest Profession. 

So with these films, and in fact from Pierrot le Fou (1965) onwards, the whole concept of a story narrative gets radically shaken up. Godard famously quipped that "films should have a beginning, middle and end, but not necessarily in that order." But the fragmentation of narrative goes way beyond a little Memento-style displacement of timeline. 

What does it mean that a pair of Victorian-era goofballs, one of whom is identified as Emily Brontë and the other is a Tweedledum-looking weirdo with fragments of poetry stapled to his costume, meet the nasty bourgeois antiheroes in the woods and try to teach them the poetics and metaphysics of rocks? In a segment captioned as "Lewis Carroll in the Woods"? And that Emily Brontë ends up incinerated by the pair? Is there an allegorical message in this vignette or is it just the opposite, an absurdity so absurd that it's designed to break your brain from the habit of constructing allegories, analogies and interpretations? 

You might call this the Brecht versus Buñuel dilemma, and though this is oversimplifying somewhat, here Brecht stands for didactic allegory with a message, and Buñuel for the Dadaesque absurdity that breaks you of logical thought processes altogether. Let's examine the central movement of the narrative. Essentially all Godard movies of this period, from Breathless to this one, are about a central couple in a sexual-romantic relationship who do something violent and transgressive then go on a road trip as fugitives. There's sex, violence and a journey. 

A Brechtian take on this would see the genre trappings of American film noir and the bourgeois background of the protagonists and say that the story's parodic elements of sexy-rebel crime fiction are there as subversion and counterpoint to the true journey, which is the viewers' journey toward understanding class relations, exploitation and the need for a liberating revolution. 

Très bien. The Buñuelian interpretation of all of that is in fact no real "interpretation" at all. It's instead a praxis where the thing that maintains bourgeois dominance in economics, politics and psychology is the addiction to "common sense" unimaginative thought, which must be broken by intensive subjection to absurd images and intrusions into everyday narrative. By this reading all the strange vignettes where wacky characters spouting pseudo-philosophical gibberish, kinky sex stuff, or inexplicable violence disrupt the flow of story, are not an allegory of something else, they are the whole point of the experience. 

So it's not a film about revolution, the film is revolution, at least it's a revolutionary act and so part of the psychological component of the revolution as it develops. The ideal end-state for Godard is that you, the bourgeois viewer, end up as part of a sexy chic guerrilla group deep in the woods (with or without an annoying hippie drummer jamming along), chewing on the roasted haunch of your former abusive and manipulative partner, whose desires for a new Maserati led you into inauthentic exploitation and murder of your old mum. 

Though of course not literally, it's like symbolic of something else, salaud. Or maybe not. I'm not sure, my brain is broken by subjection to Dadaesque imagery and Mao thought expressed as Pop Art, and I need to go in a darkened room now and plot the overthrow of capitalist society while sitting sexily and provocatively in a large saucer of milk.

[Edited down from my article in Letterboxd on Weekend]