Olivier Assayas Poll

Saw Cold Water last night. The whole bonfire segment was incredible.

Assayas did, if you take notice of such things, slip up with music chronology a couple of times. The film is set in '72, and "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" and "Cosmic Wheels" are '73. I doubt it was a slip-up, though, I think more likely he (wisely) didn't care.

I had the same reaction to the bonfire sequence - I didn't know much about it going in, and it was a lot bleaker than I was expecting, but that section was perfect. I loved how great/terrible the kids were at DJing - the audible scratches when changing records, just deciding to go back to the start of "Up Around the Bend" halfway through, etc.

This could use a repoll.

Cold Water is a superb first draft of Something in the Air.

I loved Irma Vep, Carlos, and Clouds of Sils Maria, need to watch Cold Water for the first time, need to rewatch Clean, Demonlover, Summer Hours and most of all Personal Shopper (which I liked but didn't really get the first time)

deciding to go back to the start of "Up Around the Bend" halfway through, etc.

That was a highlight, and then the way the camera mostly stayed on the one guy (maybe the guy who moved the tonearm back to the beginning) in the throes of hippie sun-grope bliss. Kind of an easy, slow-motion sun-grope.

I found Non-Fiction an arch, garrulous film that's a dud as sex farce and commentary on The Way We Live Now. His characters talk about the internet with less savvy than Sandra Bullock in 1995.

Yep, pretty much a total dud. One of my biggest disappointments at last year's TIFF.

it's as if Assayas wanted to pick up Woody Allen's 2010s mantle with Non-Fiction. I liked it fine, my expectations were tamped by Alfred & Simon's post, but yeah compared to the last two a dud. but I enjoy 2010s Woody Allen fine.

surprised Eric liked Cold Water so much given all the klassik rokk

That's like saying you're surprised I hated Thank God It's Friday so much given all the disco.

I remembered the bonfire party centerpiece pretty well, but otherwise the core of the film is very familiar, incl the Tragic Babe embodied by Ledoyen. Very well made from scene to scene of course, but I don't get the claims of greatness.

and he repeated the bonfire sequence to more sublime effect in Summer Hours.

well that i don't remember at all

it's at the end

Girish Shambu situates Cold Water as an "art-teen movie"

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5916-cold-water-dancing-on-the-ruins

They're not art movies, but there is much art in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Clueless.

and Heathers!

well, Girish points you toward Bresson and Yang

His list is fine, but it seems to be based on marketing--this is an art film, this is a commercial teen comedy--not artistic quality. To me, it's not that different than saying On the Beach must be a better film than Psycho, because On the Beach is about nuclear annihilation and the fate of mankind, while Psycho's about a murderer who keeps his mother's corpse locked in the basement. Many film critics would have subscribed to that in 1960.

Norman only moves his mother's corpse from her bed to the basement near the end of the movie

I'm sort of in the dark about what the discrepancy is here, clem.

Just that I think Fast Times and Clueless belong with the films he listed, but I get the sense--maybe I'm wrong--that the writer thinks non-English films about teenagers are inherently more artistic.

Oh, in that case I think you're wrong.

There are art-film releases and multiplex releases in the USA, at least in the last 44 years.

Right--which kind of circles back to my point that his notion of "art-teen movie" is grounded in marketing, not art. But I think we're going in circles now.

I think he's way more interested in art than teens, tbh.

But to each their own.

I haven't read that essay but I just watched Cold Water and it is in a completely different universe than Fast Times, Clueless, Heathers, Dazed & Confused. Yeah, "art teen movie" is otm.

(xpost) He's not though. Else he'd list Fast Times and Clueless alongside those other films.

Impasse.

I'm not trying to be willfully stubborn here. But I am going to be stubborn. We're talking past each other.

If "art-teen movie" is a genre based on how a film is marketed, its target audience, etc., then his examples make perfect sense.

But if "art-teen movie" is a genre based on how artistic a movie about teenagers is--how much it has to say about life, how much it has to say about the experience of being a teenager--then Fast Times and Clueless belong. Cold Water is a really good film--I saw it twice and would see it again. Fast Times at Ridgemont High is a better film than Cold Water. It's not great as in "great for what it is." It's a great film period.

"art film" means something specific, and it doesn't mean a "popular film" can't be art. But we all know 95% of Americans having an Edward Yang film sprung on them would walk out in 10 minutes.

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lol

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FFS

Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which I've no fondness for but that's beside the point, is not an art movie ffs.

I think it boils down to Virginie Ledoyen vs Phoeve Cates

I think we all know what this boils down to.

Nico vs the Go-Go's

I think we all know what this boils down to.

Please, continue.

Please stop.

I was trying to making a point, and I was civil the whole way. It's you who turns impulsively rude in these situations. You made some vague allusion above--I'm supposed to leave something like that unchecked? Say precisely what you want to say. And if you don't want me to respond, stop descending into nonsense like that.

Sorry for being rude, but it's a lesser sin than believing that someone writing on art films about teens, even on as consumer-minded a forum as the Criterion Collection's website, made a grievous error for not making sure to name-check Clueless.

I don't think I called it a grievous error--I understand the context in which he's writing--I'm simply saying he's making a distinction I don't agree with.

It's funny because Cold Water comes up in the liner essay (by Kent Jones?) for the CC Dazed & Confused.

I'll try to find that online, sounds good. That's how I see these things: as a continuum, not this group of films and that group of films.

(I'm guessing he makes a specific connection between Cold Water's bonfire party and the keg party in Dazed and Confused?)

It is online:

http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/424-dazed-and-confused-dream-on

Dazed and Confused was marketed as a teen comedy by the clueless Universal offshoot Gramercy Pictures, when it should have been pitched to those of us in our thirties, who had passed through this odd, floating moment in history when all decisive gestures seemed strange and suspect. One year later, Olivier Assayas would make Wood’s “horror movie” with Cold Water, which gave us the hair-raising anxiety of the seventies. Linklater was after something else..

Yes: how a film is perceived and marketed is not necessarily the same as what it actually is.

Those movies are still really different

also dazed and confused is a great movie to watch as a teen