James Gray's THE LOST CITY OF Z, a "woke David Lean film"

David Ehrlich last fall:

If not for the ineffably modern hollowness of Charlie Hunnam’s speaking voice, or the distinct rind of 21st century celebrity that still clings to co-star Robert Pattinson like the dying traces of yesterday’s cologne, someone could easily be fooled into thinking that “The Lost City of Z” was shot 40 years ago. In fact, that might be the greatest compliment a viewer could pay writer-director James Gray (“The Immigrant”), a man who seems increasingly determined to revive the glory days of our national cinema, when movies were pictures and auteurs were mavericks. Gray pulls from the past as liberally as Quentin Tarantino, but without the ego — he doesn’t try to process his influences through the slaughterhouse of his own fetishes, he simply wants to Make American Movies Great Again.

http://www.indiewire.com/2016/10/the-lost-city-of-z-review-robert-pattinson-james-gray-nyff-2016-1201737045/

― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, March 15, 2017 4:10 PM (one month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The film is opening the MSPIFF, and I'm torqued.

― insidious assymetrical weapons (Eric H.), Thursday, March 16, 2017 12:21 PM (one month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I liked this one pretty well, maybe second to Two Lovers or even better -- very different films. He suggested he was trying to make a 'woke' David Lean film, and he succeeded at least partly. My chief gripe might be i couldn't understand 20-30% of what Hunnam and Pattinson were saying. Has one of the best WWI trench warfare sequences i can recall, at least since Kubrick.

Gray was characteristically hilarious in the Q&A, doing impressions of everyone from Darius Khondji to stars-that got-away Cumberbatch and Pitt (the latter: "Jimmy Jam! I can't wait anymore") to a woman on the MPAA appeal panel ("This REEEalistic violence worries us as PEERents").

― Supercreditor (Dr Morbius), Thursday, April 13, 2017 4:44 PM (five days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I so admired how Gray resisted the temptation to be "hallucinatory," which seems to have confused some critcs.

well, they've got Herzog and Coppola for that.

And Eli Roth!

i thought this might've been occasioned by the new book by david grann (who wrote the book 'lost city of z'). i was excited to read about it.

exerpt here:

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-marked-woman

reviews here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/books/review-killers-of-flower-moon-david-grann.html?_r=0
http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-385-53424-6
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/killers-of-the-flower-moon-inside-new-true-crime-epic-w476689

http://images.gr-assets.com/books/1470699853l/29496076.jpg

this was p subtle (read: boring) but admirable in its portrayal of obsession & its devastations

Best films I've seen this year:

http://wp.me/pzXeC-6jF

i was also sorta bored by this, but not in an aggressively unpleasant way, since i still realy liked it. struck me as appropriate to the whole sober approach of the movie to never really allow the Ravel piece that pops up a few times to really take up all the space on the soundtrack--it always seems rather muted.

Saw it tonight. It's pleasantly boring, good call! It did get under my skin a bit, and I'm still meditating on it. Nobody is making movies like James Gray, they are very special, unique experiences for modern cinema. It makes me sad that he only has a cult, he's such a mainstream filmmaker IMO.

Tommy Lee Jones is “in final talks” to join Brad Pitt in James Gray’s Ad Astra, reports Deadline’s Mike Fleming Jr. “Details are being kept close to the vest, but here’s what I’ve heard: In Ad Astra (which means ‘to the stars’ in Latin), Pitt would play the slightly autistic space engineer Roy McBride. Twenty years after his father left on a one-way mission to Neptune in order to find signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence, McBride travels through the solar system to find him and understand why his mission failed.”

http://deadline.com/2017/06/tommy-lee-jones-brad-pitt-ad-astra-james-gray-new-regency-1202119181/

I thought this movie could have been better with a decent lead actor and less of the unintentional lol clunky dialogue: "but if you could see my boy now, his vim and vigour, I guarantee it would tear down your resistance in an instant"!

I have just realised that Tom Holland kid is the son of a rubbish 90's R4/HIGNFY regular and I know his uncle!

The lead actor is decent. His heartiness is just right.

I thought he was a bit wooden and not in a stiff upper lip period quality manner, but I still thoroughly enjoyed the movie tbh.

pretty much loved this, but "woke" is a stretch, did Gray actually phrase is that way?

dude has a way with final shots, and the way this one specifically recalls The Immigrant's is pretty haunting (as well as being very effective on its own)

i don't remember, Simon, but i was probably quoting a critic w/ a slight eyeroll

I still think about this movie a lot, particularly the last few minutes. Looking forward to seeing it again. I also thought the lead was good--and went along with possible clunkiness since I just assumed they talked like that back then.

Lost City of Zzzzzz

Go to the fucking jungle already.

Also Charlie Hunnam is terrible and has the least convincing English accent I've ever heard on an Englishman.

The way they handle the entire (unknown) ending is great, especially the very ending. I like Hunnam in this, and Pattinson, for that matter. I also like how there is no lazy contemporary bookend, and how they mostly skip transportation transitions from England to South America. I agree with some other take that filming on location was weirdly subtle, and not nearly as dramatic as one might expect.

yo i really liked this

one of the year's best

I think it was this, Scorsese's Silence and Woon-Park's The Handmaiden that delivered the visually sumptuous period movies of the year.

After a number of obsessive rewatchings of this I’ve gone from admiration to love. It’s an incredible movie.

Charlie Hunnam is muy guapo in this.

It took me a while to realise that he was a Geordie and a former Byker Grover(long running UK childrens tv soap), when i used to watch Sons of Anarchy. I remember reading he made this straight after the latest risible Guy Ritchie flop, talk about contrasting jobs.

Everyone who saw this should also see Embrace of the Serpent

Makes a great double feature with Z

some Exceptionally Woke people I follow jave accused this movie of racism and I am very tired

*have

Everyone who saw this should also see Embrace of the Serpent

― The Spilling of a Sacred Beer (latebloomer),

and Ixcanul

one of the year's best

― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, December 29, 2017 4:12 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ad Astra is still supposedly out in three weeks. WTF is going on there?

Yeah, it's very weird. And very hard to schedule and pitch when distributors do stuff like this.

You'd think they'd want to get a Brad Pitt sci-fi movie's release strategy figured out

The last one was kinda dumped as well. I'm not sure I get his career strategy, but I'm kinda not sure I get James Gray at all.

https://deadline.com/2019/05/20th-century-fox-brad-pitt-space-movie-ad-astra-departs-memorial-day-slot-may-fly-to-fall-1202606409/

They are pushing the release date to fall potentially.

It was originally supposed to be released last fall. This movie is never coming out.

I'm not sure I get his career strategy

the perils of trying to make mid-budget movies in the 2010s

now slated for 9/20/19 according to today's Disney/Fox date dump

this was much more interesting than I expected it to be. was assuming it would be a riff on standard Herzog/Apocalypse Now/Heart of Darkness "white man goes crazy in the jungle" tropes but it's more complex than that, and tbf that doesn't really happen at all apart from a couple sequences.

ref'ing Silence upthread makes sense, it has a similar sort of attitude towards the clash of cultures, being in the grip of larger, uncontrollable and unpredictable forces

I watched this not long after Embrace of the Serpent and it suffered massively from the comparison.

Embrace of the Serpent suffers from the comparison to , Birds of Passage , a far more realized work (I liked EOTS, don't think it has much in common w/Lost City besides location).

yeah they are very different in aesthetics, goals, narrative

I've told a number of people that this is one of my favorite movies of the last few years and most of the time they've never even heard of it.

And then of course I'm forced to provide the caveat, "well I didn't really start to like it until I watched it 3-4 times..."

And this would make a good double feature with Zama, maybe.