Thursday
Nov212013
Lone Surviving Open Thread
Thursday, November 21, 2013 at 10:14PM What's on your cinematic mind? What movie are you thinking about? Do share!
What's on mine? Well, I just got back from Peter Berg's Lone Survivor which I had to watch through my fingers it was so violent. Proud wuss in the movie house! If you want to see Mark Wahlberg, Ben Foster (mvp), and Emile Hirsch just totally brutalized with makeup effects - burns, bruises, bullet holes, broken bones -- have I got a movie for you. Also if you share my fear of monster trapeziuses, please be warned that Taylor Kitsch's totally wants to grow up to be Tom Hardy's.
Reader Comments (21)
Watching To Lie & Die in LA and further convinced that David Gordon Green nailed it with Pineapple Express more than Nicolas Winding Refn did in Drive.
Also watched the premise for Heat in LA Takedown. It's good. Why isn't Mann as credited for making TV cinematic as the less aesthetically inclined TV show-runners? Miami Vice was more than just vanilla suits and pastels, but it helped it be popular.
And I just had this minor internet fight with somebody who I am convinced has not actually seen Blue is The Warmest Color. I like but do not love the movie but the word 'porn' is being thrown around too liberally with it that I am just plain annoyed with people (including Manohla Dargis, whom I love, but felt like she has since ignored the other things she criticized of it at Cannes and made those scenes her bone to pick) who make the movie about those scenes, especially when I think there are much more interesting criticisms to hatch with it. I actually know somebody who hated the graphic novel and hated the movie for good measure, comparing as a lesser to Laurence Anyways, a much more interesting exploration of gender, sexuality, and identity. For me that is a well-stated critique. It's weird to be in the position of defending a movie that I feel like I am otherwise not going to remember aside from the great performances.
Cinematic thought of the moment: Need to watch "The Hunger Games" before tomorrow! I didn't realize Michael Arndt was co-writing the script - no wonder it's getting killer reviews.
HUNGER GAMES! TOMORROW! Sorry, but yeah.
CMG -- i have kind of mixed feelings about it today and yet it feels essential to me somehow which is why i graded it so highly.
eurocheese -- i'm suspicious of the reviews. if only because i think a lot of people get very caught up in phenomenons and want to be part of them at any cost. Like the Harry Potter films which aren't very good movies even if they're very good at being populist phenomenon and routinely won raves anyway.
Everything JFK is on my mind. The wretched "Parkland," was, unfortunately what I watched tonight. Avoid it! So many documentaries airing this weekend; I will likely be watching those all weekend.
But Nathaniel, this is a series that's going to have Julianne Moore as president. It's amazing by default.
Thinking about Her, Out of the Furnace and 12 Years a Slave and how if the first two continue to resonate with me the way the third one has, I could think about no other movies but these three for the rest of the year.
I'm a bigger fan of the movie than most here I think (though I would never argue that it's perfect) but the porn argument against Blue Is The Warmest Color weirds me out too. Interesting I guess to see how sex still has the power to disturb even us on the lefty blue side of the aisle, but I'm with @CMG. I envy the people who will watch this movie for the first time five years from now, when there's not such a frenzy around it.
On my mind at the moment though is the rewatch I did of Manhattan and how I should never let myself get caught up in the comeback chatter that always surrounds new Woody Allen movies. Manhattan is what it looks like when Woody shows up and (sorry Cate!) but Blue Jasmine ain't no Manhattan. Also I could watch a thousand movies about Mariel Hemingway's character in that movie. "Not everybody gets corrupted. You have to have a little faith in people."
Thinking about JFK assassination 50th anniversary today in pop culture and how different movies and shows view major important historical events within their own worlds.
And since it's my day off, I'm probably gonna do some mashup combo viewings of Mermaids with Noni and Cher, "The Grown Ups" episode of Mad Men and The House of Yes. I would watch Oliver Stone's JFK but I'll get too mad since that movie makes a great compelling case for itself. I would watch Love Field but nah. And maybe, I dunno, listen to Sondheim's Assassins at some point for some deep subversion.
I did this same thing for the 100th anniversary of the Titanic sinking with a late showing of the Cameron movie in theaters last year for the 3D re-release and then watched the very first episode of Downton Abbey the following morning. I dunno, I quite like the transcendent historical impact in works of fiction. Makes for a very interesting effect when it's on the day of, especially.
Blue is beautiful. It's not perfect, but it feels like some Arnaud Desplechin's movies in a sense that its chaotic nature and mistakes are part of make them very special cinematic experiences.
Blue may be imperfect, but is far from generic and that's why it's so good. It's a very specific movie.
I may be mixed about it, but I am SO leaning to its greater side. It's just like loving someone. You recognize the person's shortcomings but you still love him/her.
Now name a recent movie that is that lovable. You just can't.
Mark The First -- there is a sort of fun (wrong worrd?) art/life friction to that sort of thing which is why I think movies and television sometimes swerve towards "Greatest Hits" in historical dramas. Sometimes they do it elegantly (Mad Men is just expert at weaving in historical events without clumsy "oooh, look at this seminal event/ yearbook signpost you recognize!" but other films like the Oscar winning Cavalacade and this year, The Butler, are just so gawdy/shameless when they do it.
Cal - that is it. I feel that way about Christophe Honore's movies sometimes but not quite as loving. it's more like "i like you but your shortcomings are making me so crazy: we have to break up!
TB -- but comparing everythign to Woody Allen's Manhattan brings only disappointment. Unfair bar to clear. Most filmmakers can't do it even in their very best works.
I had a revelation the other day that in every contemporary comedy Meryl Streep has appeared in, from Heartburn to It's Complicated, she has completely, utterly, shamelessly stolen from Goldie Hawn and Diane Keaton. As if we didn't already know it, but this officially confirms that Meryl Streep is really really really smart.
Lone Survivor looks like a red state circle jerk to me.
My fiance has been in town all month, and to maximize our time together, I've been ignoring the movies. All. Month. I am planning a huge blow out. About Time, All is Lost, Blue is the Warmest Color, Catching Fire, Dallas Buyers Club, Great Expectations and Thor.
no movie, I'm having "meryl fatigue" fatigue... I can't read one more time how meryl is stealing parts from her contemporaries or how she won't share the wealth.
Ben Foster is always the mvp.
Still thinking about Dallas Buyers Club and how I just don't understand the ecstatic reviews. On the surface level I understand the Brockovich comparisons but I found Woodruff to be a much, much more tedious person to spend time with (and therefore the movie in whole) than Brockovich, which just makes me wonder if that's the biased actressexual in me. But if so, so what?
Also, apparently I missed the window to catch All is Lost in theaters in Chicago which bums me as an Oscar completist but I obviously didn't really want to see it anyway. Frankly, it looks boring.
So I'm hoping to catch either Blue is the Warmest Color or Nebraska this weekend. If we don't make it out to a theater, I'm watching Cold Mountain or House of Sand and Fog for the Supporting Actress Smackdown!
Watched Come Back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. It was my first performance from the late Karen Black and she wowed me. THAT FACE. Need to track her other films down. And Cher, this performance solidifies my respect for her as an actress. She had some tricky lines to sell in this. Definitely not Robert Altman's best, still one of my favorite directors, though. Oh Sandy Dennis, this performance kind of retroactively degrades her turn in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Probably doesn't help these are the only two of her films I've seen. Kathy Bates was a nice surprise since I didn't know she was in the film going in. Absolutely an Actressexual Select™ film.
Nathaniel, TB, cal- I honestly am siding with the movie as a result of the backlash. I have been frequently pointing out it had a 12 certificate in France but people are even questioning its Criterion release despite its Palme win and Kechiche already having a film in the collection, feeling as though Criterion lowered itself to 'porn' (I hate to think what people will make of The Night Porter in the Criterion Collection). Desplechin is a good comparison and the fact all three of those directors (Honore, Desplechin, Kechiche) are in French cinema makes me think, of course over there it is not too much of an issue of length or explicit sexuality (though I keep on hearing the gender dynamics in France are screwed up and this kind of relationship in a movie there is 'groundbreaking' as a result).
It honestly pissed me off hearing people saying, 'Oh people in the States are only liking it because of its sex scenes and it being FRENCH' as if to ignore its international acclaim from many critics across the globe when it premiered at Cannes. It's imperfect and stubbornly in just one person's perspective but I actually found watching it quite easy after the first 30 minutes when you are settled into its established pace. Usually, when I really just defend a movie embroiled in controversy that I truly believe is near-perfect cinema that will stand the test of time (Zero Dark Thirty was my case last year), so defending something I find a little too imperfect besides an amazing actress discovery is tough. But boy, are its critics making it easy.
joey- Peter Berg managed to make Red State Texas high school extremely humane, compelling, and accessible to Blue States with Friday Night Lights. I believe he can deliver a fascinating, tragic, truthful story of Operation Red Wing.
Related to nothing, but... how cool is the Google game for Doctor Who's 50th anniversary? It got me playing for way too long.
3 thoughts:
1. Saw CLOSED CIRCUIT last night, and stuck around for a Q&A with Eric Bana. I didn't like the movie, and I normally don;t stick around for a Q&A for a movie I don;t like (who cares what they have to say about it's creation?), but this was E-Ban y'all. Very charming, and very tolerant of the usual torrent of stupid questions from a mainstream starstruck audience (lowest point: What do you think about Mark "Chopper " Read dying?" He deflected that insensitive comment very well), but I was a bot dumbfounded when he started on the usual "read the script and immediately wanted to do it" routine, because the terrible script was the worst thing about the movie (followed closely by the boring direction).
2. Am going with the new girlfriend to see BRIEF ENCOUNTER, one of my Top Ten Movies Of All Time, this afternoon. Hope it goes well.....
3. Eric Bana last night, Linda Blair and a screening of THE EXORCIST tonight. Star-studded weekend....
I have to get this list out here. Warner Bros has registered domain titles for that Batman vs. Superman sequel. Here they (sigh) are:
Man of Steel: Battle the Knight
Man of Steel: Beyond Darkness
Man of Steel: Black of Knight
Man of Steel: Darkness Falls
Man of Steel: Knightfalls
Man of Steel: Shadow of the Night
Man of Steel: The Blackest Hour
Man of Steel: The Darkness Within
There's the audience WB's trying to court. Not people who want epic hopeful legacy (which is, pretty much, DC distilled), but grim, gritty and hopeless. (Which is like distilling Early 90s Image or Chaos! Comics.) Marvel, meanwhile, is going for a delicate mix of whizbang theatrics and a fair sized spoonful of sarcasm (because Joss). This movie is going to BOMB. Also: If Warner Bros wants to capture DC at their best, (which they don't really want to, of course), the starting points are three pieces of period set action/thriller fare, averaging out at $70 million each. Sandman Mystery Theatre at $50 million, Alan Scott Green Lantern at $80 million and Jay Garrick Flash, also at $80 million. After those succeed, THEN you have no excuse not to do Wonder Woman.