Kelly Reichardt's NIGHT MOVES, an ecoterror drama w/ Eisenberg, Sarsgaard, a Fanning

Haven't seen it yet.

seeing it this weekend

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7-VqKLYZks&feature=kp

when is this getting wide release

http://www.nightmovesmovie.com/screenings.html

(Cinedigm does not do "wide" really)

ah looks like it'll be in my neck of the woods over the next couple of weeks anyways, thx! haven't seen a reichardt film in a theater yet and would really like to.

http://www.citizenpoulpe.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/night-moves3.jpg

"I saw a Kelly Reichardt film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry."

NOTE: I have not actually seen a Kelly Reichardt film yet.

congrats my friend made same joke on phone yesterday

There are too many sarsgaards

Loved this.

I love all of Reichardt's movies (with Old Joy being an actual all-time favorite), but I couldn't crack this. The lack of ANY info out of Eisenberg's character was so frustrating, and not in any kind of satisfying way. The only damning-with-faint-praise thing I can come up with is that at least it wasn't The East

David Denby reviewed an Eisenberg double feetch in this week's New Yorker

I saw it last Autumn at the London Film Festival, and someone actually asked in the Q&A "was there ever a point where you wanted to give the audience any information at all about the character's motivations? Seems like the main angle with eco terrorists is always the media handwringing about what leads people to this, so to not bring it up feels less like a take on it and more just avoiding having to explore something real with it etc." and Jesse Eisenberg was like "well, Kelly and I discussed this whole backstory where the character was kind of a trust-fund guy w-" and then Kelly Reichardt practically leapt across the stage to knock the mic out of his hand and fully castigated him and was like "we don't talk about that stuff."

I think my main problem was the last 20 minutes, though - I suspect that will be the issue for most people who don't dig it

btw after 2 weeks at the Angelika in NY, this is being shunted to the not-prime Village East tomorrow. Did not set the b.o. on fire last week in 31 theaters.

(gonna try noon tomw myself)

i'm not really a kelly reichardt fan (i find that she basically does some nice but none too revelatory variations of common art-house themes and narrative tropes) but somehow i would really like to see this.

feel like she gets a lot of critical respect for "addressing issues" that mainstream films do not address which doesn't necessarily translate into compelling movies. but sometimes (as in "old joy" esp.) the "addressing issues" feels more like "citing issues" in a kind of non-commital (sp?) way that doesn't impress me.

similarly a lot of critics seem overly impressed by some of her narrative gambits (ending on a note of heightened ambiguity, ellipses where mainstream movies would have Big Scenes) which are common to art cinema. compared to i dunno the amazing spider-man they are still "out there" but the better critics will have also seen tons of art films that have the same or similar strategies so i'm surprised they think the reichardt films pack that kind of contrarian power.

all of which means = i'm real curious to see this one, since it is her first film (I think) that actually centers around several of those "issues" (environmentalism, terrorism) and doesn't just allude to them.

I liked this, tho when the third act gets 'plotty' it's probably least convincing. Eisenberg at his least tic-y.

that's good to hear, he's been kind of hard to take in a lot of stuff lately.

Vadim Rizov's review/interview w/ Reichardt, perhaps best read after seeing.

Firstly for me, it’s a character film, and that’s how we approached it when we were writing. I hope all the films, at the end of the day, ask a question. They’re certainly not there to reinforce anything that anybody already thinks. I think that there is a question, and the question is, are any of these good solutions? Do any of them add up to anything? And if blowing shit up is not the thing to do, what should anybody be doing right now? If we’re gonna be driven over the cliff, and our government’s obviously not going to help us because they’re in the petroleum business, and things are as dire as they seem to be, why don’t we all go blow stuff up?

http://filmmakermagazine.com/86114-why-dont-we-all-go-blow-stuff-up-kelly-reichardt-on-night-moves/#.U58y_fldVyw

I do want to see this though I find Kelly Reichardt films pretty frustrating. WENDY AND LUCY had its moments but that's about all I liked. I feel like going on some rant about American "independent" cinema, but maybe I'll save it until after I've actually seen the thing.

i know what you mean i think. but honestly her films are highlights considering how shitty most american independent films are. another thing distancing me from brody is that i cannot. get into. "mumblecore." at. all. the filmmaking in the films i've seen is so lazy it's an abomination.

hey i liked this. it's strange seeing eisenberg on screen, now, now that he's become a kind of beacon for a certain type, a lot of male traits just sorta presumable based on his casting, but i thought he was good, that by the end he'd built up some weight as the inscrutable guy in the corner, you watch his face sharpen throughout, he had a physicality he otherwise just doesn't, isolated instead of just asocial. it hadn't occurred to me that we were being deprived of any motivation; i really don't think we were? between the scene-setting in which we get the parameters of the crunchy eco movement & their propaganda & reflexive anti ipod-isms i think we can extrapolate that they all have sorta separatist, kinda contrarian college-y identities to different degrees. reichardt was just so non-stop sardonic in painting everything else with that brush, too; vapid supermarket music, chumpy families strolling in the woods, the spectre of gentrified portland, they are going to blow up a dam because they are the people who do that. anyway i dug it, & thought it pulled off something hard pretty well, the first hour having felt like its own ample procedural movie, more effective in generating suspense than i knew she could be, & then the second half dealing with the awkward rhythm of the thing having happened & our expectations sort of diffusing. at risk of appearing grossly to try to diagnose a "point" to all of this, i did think there was this nice thread throughout arising from the sort of symmetrical uncertainty everybody feels; it isn't the tenuous peripatetic thing of old joy but just a kind of awkward momentum that all the characters have, all situations seeming suffocatingly open & flexible to them, everything debatable or inert to their attention. eisenberg as a kind of sort of snowballing, roaming, de-tuned activist, it feels like a nice way for her to get at the expansiveness & distance of the themes she's circling, cf amateurist above.

looked just so beautiful, too, in composition & grain & tone.

It's strange casting Eisenberg when he isn't playing an Eisenberg type. Tobey Maguire could've played his character.

James Le Gros in a bit part!

In some ways this is her best film? The rigors of suspense put her ellipses and fascination with putting alienated people against Northwest landscapes into worthwhile paces. Sarsgaard's prissy Malkovich-lite malice well used too.

it doesn't feel like The Place Beyond the Pines Sundance fare.

still prefer Meek's Cutoff

i have a plausibility problem with the big Act 3 event

i need to see this

This played at the film festival here but the speakers blew a fuse halfway thru (post-dam) and there was only one channel of audio so for about 20 minutes we couldn't hear any music or dialogue, just atmospheric noise birdsong &c as eisenberg wandered around looking glum. Then they turned it off completely and I didn't see how it ended

It was good

I think this might only be on Prime but Night Moves was really good

i've read that Eisenberg plays basketball and everything but as hinted above i wasn't entirely convinced he could do that thing in the third act.

need to see this, i pretty much adore kelly reichardt

old joy is definitely an all-time favorite for me

also a couple weeks ago i saw "wild" w/ reese witherspoon and i couldn't help thinking that it would've been a much better film with reichardt directing and michelle williams starring

for anyone with an interest in an actual documentary abt some of these issues, I recommend "If A Tree Falls"

http://www.ifatreefallsfilm.com/

I was so down on Meek's Cutoff, I didn't rush to see this. Rented it out last night, and I liked it enough that I regret not seeing it in a theatre--lots of beautiful cinematography. The story couldn't have been sparer, but I wasn't bored.

Just watched this too, the ending was lame but overall still a v good movie.

holds up well on second viewing. best of the seven or so Eisenberg performances i've seen, i think.

SPOILER
*
*
*
*

it was kind of apparent this time that JE sort of gets the (conscious?) go-ahead from Sarsgaard to knock off D Fanning (who is p terrific).

yea i wasnt really into this but dakota is def a good actress

ok fine I will watch it

for anyone with an interest in an actual documentary abt some of these issues, I recommend "If A Tree Falls"

http://www.ifatreefallsfilm.com/

― some kind of terrible IDM with guitars (sleeve), Friday, January 9, 2015 1:25 PM (4 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

thanking you sleeve! i was searching and searching ilx to find out which thread it was where you recommended this. anyways we watched this a few months ago and loved it, it was very well done. that one dude in particular who wore that green shirt and lived in a cabin the woods and had encyclopedic knowledge of pacific-NW environmental activism just hung around in my head for weeks, i kept thinking about him and what an interesting personality he was

this dude!

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film3/dvd_reviews54/if_a_tree_falls_earth_liberation_front_/if_a_tree_falls_oscilloscope_dvd_cap03.jpg

i couldve listened to him for hours and often wished the documentary was about him instead of daniel mcgowan

saw this over the weekend. it was good! some thoughts (spoilers obv, do i even need to say that):

1) this was more "hollywood" than i thought it would be tbh, based on her other films. i honestly didn't even expect that the bombing was even going to happen. this is kelly reichardt! i mean i think about "old joy" in which not much really happens at all (yet "so much happens" of course but still). i felt like there was prob a 80% chance that their plot just fails or we see multiple failed attempts or whatever. i admit it was very strange to even see the bombing mission succeed an hour into the film. also i tend to really love the slow pace of her films and it was interesting to see her take on a more briskly paced thriller w/ a clearer plot line.

2) actors were all pretty good, eisenberg was great. schlump otm upthread about eisenberg being "isolated" rather than asocial, that point was especially apparent in that final phone call with sarsgaard when he is crying and asking sarsgaard "can we just go somewhere together in the middle of nowhere" very powerful. btw i didn't know sarsgaard was in this until i kept staring at that character's first scene and thinking "oh that's sarsgaard!" he was good, i had a very strong sense of who this guy was. fanning was very good too i thought.

3) lots of talk about what the characters' "motivations" were and how the lack of attention given to that was a weakness (david denby called it a "hole" in the film. idk. i agree w/ schlump, it wasn't really necessary for me? i mean how much motivation backstory do you need? just the crew they were hanging out with at that activist event at the beginning and the film about environmental destruction filled me in enough to know who these people are. even the expository dialogue about ipads and golf courses was even too much i thought!

4) again thank you sleeve for turning me on to "if a tree falls." i feel like there should be a double feature w/ these two films or something. i saw that one a while back and honestly like that was the backstory for me. also i've spent a lot of time in my early 20s acquainted with some pretty out-there environmental/animal activists fantasizing or debating or even doing (on a much smaller, non-violent direct action way) shit like this so i never really spent even a second watching this movie wishing "oh wow i really wish we had more exposition about why these characters are doing such a thing!!"

5) i saw some interview (i think it was quoted upthread) where she says the central question in the film was "is this a good solution?" i.e. "should we be blowing shit up?" idk. i never really saw that as a question posed by this film. by "in a tree falls", yes definitely. but not this. imo it didn't really engage much at all with that question and not even like 5% of the wat "if a tree falls" did. i couldn't imagine anyone really coming away from the "night moves" grappling with that question with any seriousness or depth unless you are very young or naive. it was still a very good film though.

6) yes very beautifully filmed. all her films are imo. also very good costume/set design, you knew these folks, you could smell the fertilizer, you could smell the soil and the trees, you could feel that cool damp air.

7) i kind of agree w/ morbs about the third act plausibility w/ eisenberg's character, though that final phone call when he was freaking out calling it an "accident" (maybe to cover his ass if the phone is tapped? idk) and crying and shit, and also the ambiguous conversations about "making sure dee doesn't talk" makes it a little more complex than just eisnberg being a psychopath

lovely music, too

6) yes very beautifully filmed. all her films are imo. also very good costume/set design, you knew these folks, you could smell the fertilizer, you could smell the soil and the trees, you could feel that cool damp air.

still think about this film for its kinda just-right digi-16mm alexa vibe, like it really works with the vibrancy of colour & grain & richness of land & clothing while still feeling pretty modern or at least not feeling at all retro. it's v well measured & the landscape is so distinct.

yea definitely! one scene though that did feel pretty retro visually was the act 3 climax in the sauna -- all the steam and that reddish light and the intensity of the scene gave it this classic horror movie vibe i thought

great director, good movie, awful lead

eisenberg? wrong

he has NO range... same off-putting semi-sociopath creepy nerd in every movie. worked in the squid and the whale & the social network