Bennett Miller's Rasslin' Film Foxcatcher

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