Bennett Miller's Rasslin' Film Foxcatcher

BM's reaction to the question reminded me of the look on Redgrave's face when she contemplated wrestling trophies in her horsey collection room. Gay themes ... are low themes.

I did not jump on the 20-min window of MoMA tix for this, or Whiplash. I think the Oscarshit gods are trying to tell me something.

I would not be terribly surprised to see this one fail to earn much Oscar attention outside of Carrell.

watching today. Anyone else seen it?

Piece of shit, especially when you know how they changed the story.

To paraphrase Chris rock re Jim Carrey, I can name a dozen actors who could put on a fake nose and do some upper class Norman bates bullshit in a portentous non-thriller, but only one guy who could make me enjoy Dinner For Schmucks.

Wish they'd just gone all out and made Carell dress up like Vanessa Redgrave and sniff Channing etc. if the whole of your movie is "watch out for closet cases!" no reason to avoid camp.

Channing tatum looked helplessly earnest and mark Ruffalo looked empathetic, but this time with prosthetics

If you're going to watch a guy fuck up a nice family's shit over mommy issues, insidious 2 is on streaming

yeah the further away i get from it the more i find the changes to the story really tough to take, like someone was so desperate to turn the interesting-sounding raw material into a movie that they did a real slash and burn job.

i enjoyed all the acting well enough but it was nothing special, just actors i like plus a tolerable steve carrell.

Fave scene was when carrel finally sat down with Redgrave and man I would not want to be wearing a fake schnozz and an OTT aristocratic voice during my one scene with her

It made her air of polite embarrassment seem doubly real

OK this was terrible. "So slow," moaned the old woman in front of me when closing credits rolled.

My mom's hospital had a special room for John DuPont with like Louis XVI style chairs and whatnot, ask me anything

learning actual interesting details about john dupont would only make me hate this movie more

it's a good idea to avoid films where the ad quotes lead off w/ P Travers & R Reed.

My review. It's a movie for people who long for eighties prestige films.

Fucking horrible.

What a fucking strange, torturous bag of shit this was. Could tell he was capable of making something as completely bad just by the way he wielded the cutesy sing kid in Moneyball.

i could tell he was capable of it by making the story of how truman capote came to write the book about a family being murdered more dour than capote's book itself.

I had completely forgot that he he made that! He is the king of critically overrated crap in this era.

He's dead even for me with Alexander Payne.

this sounds pretty terrible. i actually think bennett miller is talented -- the cinematography of "moneyball" was way more inventive than it had much right to be -- but this movie seems like the kind of thing that would hit every predictable "downbeat docudrama" beat. the advance interviews, in which miller seems eager to imply that his film has something to say "about America" made me really wary.

To paraphrase Chris rock re Jim Carrey, I can name a dozen actors who could put on a fake nose and do some upper class Norman bates bullshit in a portentous non-thriller, but only one guy who could make me enjoy Dinner For Schmucks.

such a good point.

i bet ebert would have loved the shit out of this movie (just as Todd McCarthy did).

This is great, one of the funniest and coolest movies I've seen in a while. You can call me... Golden Eagle. rofl

The frosted tips reveal, Carell trying to drunkenly double leg guys at the worlds afterparty, the coke scene... this movie was killing me. I had a great time with how funny it is, and also it's really tense-funny like an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm because you dont know what awkward social situation Du Pont will create next.

Mark Ruffalo is so cool, I wnated him to give me wrestling hugs and be my cool borther who slaps me in the head

directors really seem to have a hard time dealing with mental illness /qua/ mental illness, maybe because it doesn't suit their ambitions.

― I dunno. (amateurist), Thursday, November 20, 2014 3:43 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark

Why do they have to 'have a hard time dealing with' it instead of it just not being what interests them about the stoty?

apparently it wasnt meant to be funny tho

also the guy Tatum plays had a freakout on Twitter about it

Cool true crime movie about how Mark Ruffalo is the saint of wrestling and MMA is where wrestler's go to have their souls balled up and slam dunked into a trash can. This movie was made for me

also the guy Tatum plays had a freakout on Twitter about it

― touch of a love-starved cobra (Dr Morbius), Saturday, January 3, 2015 2:59 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

If I was Mark Schultz I'd hate this movie too lol... how could he not? Look what a dope it portrayed him as. Can't imagine being in that guy's shoes. But I'm not him so I got to have a hootin & hollerin good time at the cinema

plus all that hunger for ass!

Carell isn't as good as Tatum or Ruffalo. The nose hurts him. He's already got a distinctive nose, they didn't have to make him look like Sam the Eagle. It was the right move to cast a comedian though because it primes you to constantly be in that "should I be laughing at this or not?" zone at everything he says.

the nose was a weird choice. like is du pont's nose such an iconic and outstanding characteristic that they had to putty him up? i've seen pics of the dude, his nose is pretty normal imo. i mean if they can make a movie with josh brolin as bush and and just give him some salt-n-pepper hair and nothing else, i dunno why they bothered to do anything w/carell.

every still i've seen of the movie it's like the nose is out there, like the visual point of the scene, like some pinocchio shit.

Yeah Carell mostly underplays it... If he scaled his performance up to match the nose it might've worked better. But then the movie would lose the effect of him being Dracula and become something more antic instead. Glad I dont have to make these hard creative decisions

I'm reading these last 10 posts and thinking I've stumbled into a nightmare.

i hope Carell kept the nose and uses it for a live-action Despicable Me movie.

a live action DM in Magyar would have been funnier than Foxcatcher.

directors really seem to have a hard time dealing with mental illness /qua/ mental illness, maybe because it doesn't suit their ambitions.

― I dunno. (amateurist), Thursday, November 20, 2014 3:43 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark

Why do they have to 'have a hard time dealing with' it instead of it just not being what interests them about the stoty?

― Hungry4Ass, Saturday, January 3, 2015 1:53 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sort of the same thing, i think. so many films avoid dealing with mental illness as such because the other approaches are both easier and earn plaudits.

i mean "what interests them about the story" is a really context-specific and malleable thing. think of the millions of times that directors who tackle an overtly political subject say something like "i wasn't really interested in politics as such, i wanted to take a personal angle"--as if those things aren't intimately related. taking the "personal angle" and avoiding politics just so happens to conform to the mainstream narrative filmmaking norm, and what's more it satisfies the requirement that such films don't take a strong political position thus are less likely to offend anyone.

this probably has nothing to do with foxcatcher, which i sitll haven't seen... just responding to, ahem, "Hungry4Ass" (for chrissakes, change your screen name!)

This thing is as subtle as Carrel's nose. It was the easiest aesthetic choice for Miller to film ponderous takes of actors behaving as they've been taught to in a hundred years of Weird Characters.

It was the right move to cast a comedian though because it primes you to constantly be in that "should I be laughing at this or not?" zone at everything he says.

Casting a comedian with a prosthetic nose is priming the audience to laugh, intentionally or not. That's neither brave nor right. Casting the comedian and applying prosthetics strikes me as the easiest of aesthetic decisions.

i hope Carell kept the nose and uses it for a live-action Despicable Me movie.

― un chill goon (some dude), Saturday, January 3, 2015 5:39 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

http://i.imgur.com/tDZrw3C.jpg

This isn't that far off from the Du Pont makeup.

you have to deal with mental illness if you're dealing with this story though. i mean the main tragedy of the true story is that du pont was obviously struggling with paranoid schizophrenia and went unmedicated/untreated because his family didn't want to deal with it and he was rich enough to surround himself with people that tolerated his behavior and chalked it up to eccentricity. if the murder didn't happen there wouldn't be a movie, and the murder wasn't mysterious, it was just really sad. schultz died meaninglessly.

yeah i think the writers got caught in this thing where they were so desperate to avoid making a movie about mental illness that they made a movie about nothing.

I remember thinking the film does "deal" with mental illness to the extent that there's a an obvious disconnect to DuPont. So much of what makes it unnerving and darkly funny is that no one would be involved with this person if they weren't paying for everything. Schizophrenia can manifest itself in many ways. The criticism that the film "depathologizes" DuPont makes me wonder whether people wanted a doctor to come on screen and explain things.

you have to deal with mental illness if you're dealing with this story though.

Bennett "Madman" Miller says otherwise.

Actually it does deal with his mental illness. His flat schizophrenic affect, the cocaine for self-medication, it's all there it just isn't garishly signposted or made a plot point. Everyone just indulges this "eccentric" guy and tells themselfs he's just an awkward weirdo. But Du Pont never becomes more than an evil goblin stalking around his lair, which is, y'know... the mommy issues stuff sucks. I don't think Miller's that imaginative when it comes to character. Chasing the horses out of the barn lol. But I can live with it cuz of all the good stuff.

The murder's sad in the movie. It sucked when Dave was shot to death. I was hoping he'd charge JDP and do some badass wrestling moves on him.

you're making a decent argument that mark schultz, the main character, is completely pointless and the least interesting thing in the movie.

I don't understand.

I knew I was gonna love this movie as soon as we see Mark scarfing down some Arby's in his car.

I thought Mark was great. What a tender ass dude... so vulnerable... I couldn't even take how raw he was sometimes.

I love when boy band Mark is like "what troubles you my liege..." as he lounges at the feet of Carell doing his regal Lou Pearlman thing. I've been thinking about that all day and cracking up.

This movie touched you in the head, huh.

I agree that the mommy issue stuff isn't good. Probably the only thing I didn't like along with some of the music cues. Although the scene when he does the phoney coaching for her benefit alone I enjoyed for the same reason all of the stupid involved with his having a documentary crew chronicle how great he is is good.

all the *stuff involved.

thought this suffered from a common biopic prob of not really enough conflict, and also some odd choices of what & how to tell the story;

id prob rather of seen a documentary on this tho esp cuz idk several scenes felt kinda too constructed - thinking of ruffalo struggling in the interview to say dupont's his mentor & du pont near the end intruding on dave and his fam in the general's coat

@ least they got the cauliflower ears right

ruffalo was v good, dave is portrayed as maybe the nicest character ever captured in film and i buy it

few things give me greater pleasure than ILX laying into a film i hated. christ this was some morbidly tedious shit. how come Ruffalo suddenly changed his mind and came to the farm anyway? that was never explained. and they had long enough. take all the pauses and sighing and gazing into the distance out and it'd have been 35 minutes long.

also; seen the trailer? seen the film.

Ruffalo was good though.

Really liked this. Found it genuinely creepy, legitimately funny in places, and pretty sad.

I don't quite understand how people think the movie avoids repressed sexuality - it's hovering over every single one of Carell's scenes!

That New Yorker thing about 'what's missing from Foxcatcher is sex' is ridiculous - the whole (heavy handed, sure, fine) point is that Mark is a guy who spend all day with his face in other dudes' armpits and crotches or whatever and he is completely incapable of any real normal human contact.

how come Ruffalo suddenly changed his mind and came to the farm anyway?
I don't remember the specifics of how this plays out, but it follows Mark claiming Dave 'can't be bought' - cut to: Anybody can be bought. It also introduces some tension in the fact that you know Dave is probably getting way more money than Mark (who earlier says "I just thought of the highest number I could when he said 'name your price.')

i haven't read that the film avoids acknowledging repressed sexuality, in fact it's been charged with gay-baiting precisely for seeming to indicate that the main character is a homicidal closet case

ven before he developed delusions that he was being spied on by Nazis and that horses were sending him messages from Mars, there were signs that multimillionaire John Eleuthère du Pont was, at the very least, eccentric.
Touring his 880-acre Foxcatcher Farm in an armoured personnel carrier, he would describe seeing Disney characters looming out of the rain, or trees uprooting themselves and marching around the estate. He feared that intruders were hiding in the walls of his $4 million stately home, hired security contractors to check for secret tunnels under his floorboards, and had the balls on his billiard table checked for listening devices.

Hey, this would make quite a good movie instead of the boring, depressing pos I just watched.

"Even before..."

Never bothered with this. The Team Foxcatcher documentary that's on Netflix tells the undeniably crazy and sad story; per VG upthread, it's the 30 for 30 equivalent you'll want to watch instead.

totally! i did end up watching the 30 for 30... there's another doc too I think. i'm glad they exist as a counter to the movie

but yeah... the movie took a complicated story and boiled it down so much it didn't resemble much of anything except a deeply fictionalized story that Miller wanted to tell

... like Moneyball