Back to the Future

so fortunate that the stars aligned and cosmically transported Stoltz to another dimension where cameras could no longer perceive him

http://i.imgur.com/IoDHMnh.png

Ha

http://i.imgur.com/2iDRQdw.jpg

pred ship

what is that, an Alien egg?

mr peanut with chompers

david lynch also guilty of conservastolgia

don't buy this, Lynch is about as apolitical (in his work at least, can't speak for anything else) as name American filmmakers get

i think there are traces of a retrograde class and racial politics in lynch's films, but it's filtered through his own idiosyncratic style and psychosexual mythopoetics.

i guess i'd say that even "apolitical" artists have a politics, even if i wouldn't push that argument super-hard.

FWIW i like plenty of more obviously reactionary films, even something as politically goofy as 'red dawn' which is a superb film.

(the original obv, not the remake w/ thor)

I agree that Forrest Gump is really ugly in its reactionary conservatism, but I also agree with Amateurist that BttF isn't such a clear-cut case. I mean, the whole point of the first movie is that the '50s wasn't such a cleaner era as nostalgia would have it, teens were drinking and smoking and having sex just as they are in the '80s. And remember, this is a movie that culminates on an attempted rape in a school dance, and it's implied that had George not interfered, Biff would've probably gotten away with it. Also, while the movie doesn't really touch the subject that much, and it could've definitely done more with it, the treatment of Goldie Wilson and the school dance band does remind that the '50s were also uglier than the '80s in some.

So to me it feels that the people who critize the first movie for conservatism and/or idolizing the '50s miss the whole point of it, they probably just remember the "Mister Sandman" scene and not much else.

And I do agree that the materialistic ending of Part I is kinda problematic, but as someone points out, it's more in the vain of "everyone gets what they want", not "everyone becomes rich". For example, we see that George has become a published sci-fi writer, so it's not just "he got rich, whoo-hoo!", it's that he became successful by pursuing his youthful dream.

And let's not forger that in Part II rampant capitalism turns the alternate 1985 Hill Valley into a hellhole. Yeah, you could read it as a "It's a Wonderful Life" style human-friendly small business vs. faceless big business juxtaposition, but it certainly makes it harder to say these are right-wing movies in any meaningful sense.

Just one time i wish the "what weve learned" from these puddlewanks could be "just watch the movie and turn off the failed alternative career part of your mind"

zemeckis strikes me as more of a 'natural' filmmaker (in terms of just knowing exact where to place--and how to move-- the camera, how to pace a screenplay and a scene, how to locate the small gesture that nails a character type) than a lot of more ambitious, and more critically respected, 'art' filmmakers.

― wizzz! (amateurist), Wednesday, 20 July 2016 00:33 (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

like just to pick a not particularly apposite example, jacques rivette.

― wizzz! (amateurist), Wednesday, 20 July 2016 00:35 (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Cool, will leave you to watch the 'natural' genius of Beowulf and Polar Express while I'm enjoying rescreening Celine and Julie (which, just for starters, includes a tracking shot up a steep flight of steps that is more cinematically joyous than the entirety of Back to the fucking Future).

hey, i didn't say i loved all his movies!

but yeah, celine&julie is one of those movies beloved by many folks i admire and respect that i just can't appreciate. and i've sat through it 1 1/2 times (i walked out after 30 minutes in the last attempt). it strikes me as flat-footed and irritating in its forced whimsy (and honestly it's the flat-footedness that makes the whimsy hard to take; cf. wes anderson whose films i like a lot).

so, to each his own i guess.

Lynch famously voted for Reagan

xpost

uh-huh

While I agree that there is a pleasure to be had from craft and, the well-made film object etc, I also think (as I'm sure you do) that cinema would be terribly limited if the only films made were those that conformed to the techniques and values of classical Hollywood narrative. Like, I think there's a point to the awkwardness and 'flat-footedness' that you perceive in Rivette's storytelling - he's trying to create his own deeply personal and felt cinematic language rather than rely on the whole support system of big budget filmmaking (where it should be frankly impossible to make a technically shoddy sequence, given the resources available).

I think Lynch's conservatism is undeniable, though it isn't usually overtly political. But if you look at his oeuvre, sex and sexuality for women are almost always depicted as somehow wrong and perverted, and sexually active women are punished in various ways, whereas more "pure" women aren't. I think Inland Empire is pretty much his only work where sex is depicted positively w/r/t to female characters.

To wins - I know Lynch expressed admiration for Reagan, but did he actually vote for him? There was an interview a few years back where Lynch p much admitted that a lot of his declared Republicanism was challopsian contrarian posturing. I can't find the full text of the interview, but I think these quotes are taken from it:

I’m a Democrat now. And I’ve always been a Democrat, really. But I don’t like the Democrats a lot, either, because I’m a smoker, and I think a lot of the Democrats have come up with these rules for non-smoking. And I don’t think that that’s necessarily so bad, but they have to give the smokers a place.

I believe Mitt Romney wants to get his Mitts on R Money. He would like to get it and divide it up with his friends, the Big Money Bunch.

http://hollowverse.com/david-lynch/

Some more discussion on Lynch's conservatism in this thread:

Artists who appear to be conservative/right-wing at heart, yet are mostly lauded by liberals/leftists.

While I agree that there is a pleasure to be had from craft and, the well-made film object etc, I also think (as I'm sure you do) that cinema would be terribly limited if the only films made were those that conformed to the techniques and values of classical Hollywood narrative. Like, I think there's a point to the awkwardness and 'flat-footedness' that you perceive in Rivette's storytelling - he's trying to create his own deeply personal and felt cinematic language rather than rely on the whole support system of big budget filmmaking (where it should be frankly impossible to make a technically shoddy sequence, given the resources available).

― Foster Twelvetrees (Ward Fowler), Wednesday, 20 July 2016 09:58 (19 minutes ago) Permalink

but this isn't about "classical hollywood filmmaking" vs "personal filmmaking" -- it's just a comparison b/t two particular filmmakers. i prefer the best of zemeckis's films to anything i've seen by rivette, but i prefer the best of abbas kiarostami's films to anything by zemeckis.

i just think that even by the standards of, say, the new wave filmmakers, rivette -- esp. in the 1960s and 1970s -- strikes me as a flat-footed stylist. (i like some of the 1980s and 1990s films better than e.g. C&J.) but that's just, like, my opinion, man.

i also think you might be underestimating how hard it is to make a film as finely-tuned as BttF.

No, your original post clearly set up an opposition between two different styles of filmmaking - 'natural' vs 'ambitious', and it was only after that you brought Rivette into the equation -

zemeckis strikes me as more of a 'natural' filmmaker (in terms of just knowing exact where to place--and how to move-- the camera, how to pace a screenplay and a scene, how to locate the small gesture that nails a character type) than a lot of more ambitious, and more critically respected, 'art' filmmakers.

And it's true, I don't think BTTF is especially 'fine tuned'

But then, I don't really understand 'flat footed' in regard to Rivette, who seems to know exactly what he wants to achieve through mise en scene, performance, dialogue etc (whether you think that's worth achieving is of course another matter)

As another point of comparison, Rivette's La Religieuse had a higher budget than his norm, conventional narrative and performance, standard visuals and editing - and is one of his least interesting and affecting films

There is no public evidence that Lynch voted for Reagan FYI

XP

There's no public evidence that Reagan voted for Reagan.

http://cache1.asset-cache.net/gc/515546336-pacific-palisades-calif-nancy-reagan-peeks-gettyimages.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=X7WJLa88Cweo9HktRLaNXrX03MdydjPjQH8tat%2Betmg3ErsOKCLnLCF1Fw2Utwe%2FkcWHmU3uRJwSwa0wGO4hbg%3D%3D

There is no public evidence that Lynch voted for Reagan FYI

XP

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, July 20, 2016 8:03 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he explains his Reagan support in Lynch on Lynch. Talks about how he didn't like all the regulations and red tape that complicated shooting films and so reaganist small government appealed to him, and he also liked Reagan as an actor in cowboy films, he found him aesthetically appealing.

I've read the quotes, he doesn't say he voted for him

he seems basically apolitical really. I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't vote in general.

Right, I misremembered about the voting. Pretend I said "publicly supported"

I agree w everyone btw that his being drawn to Reagan is to do w his general "apoliticism" and small-c conservative streak

Sorry this is a derail let's talk at length about the mechanics of doc hijacking a second train in 1885 and turning it into a time machine

a guy who lives a block or two away from me drives a delorean. it sounds like shit when it drives by.

doubt it can get up to 88mph

88 mph <<---- more right-wing propaganda when you think about it.

I think Inland Empire is pretty much his only work where sex is depicted positively w/r/t to female characters.

you mean the locomotion dance sequence?

y'know, locomotion, like a certain locomotive? like a steam powered time machine?

I like back to the future

No, your original post clearly set up an opposition between two different styles of filmmaking - 'natural' vs 'ambitious',

that's not what i said at all. or at the very least not at all what i intended to convey. i was actually comparing two particular filmmakers, not two "styles of filmmaking." "natural" vs. "ambitious" were not meant to be opposed. FWIW i think BttF is very ambitious, albeit in a different way than something like OUT ONE, or THROUGH THE OLIVE TREES, or whatever other "art" film you care to name.

maybe the choice of rivette threw the conversation off. i could just as easily have named richard donner or james wan or george stevens as "popular" directors who don't seem to me to have zemeckis's talent, or put less mystically, don't make films as good as zemeckis's best. maybe such comparisons would be more apposite and less distracting.

but i was being polemical in my choice of rivette, b/c there are still plenty of film fans (or film snobs or film critics or whoever) who persistently underrate and/or condescend to the best popular filmmakers, thinking that even if they have "chops" (a word that has come up a few times in this thread) that the films they make are self-evidently of a lesser kind than those made by "art" filmmakers like rivette or angeloupoulos or tsai or bergman or whomever. zemeckis in particular -- or certain of zemeckis's films, rather -- seem to be a casualty of this bias.

i also happen to think that some of zemeckis's most enthusiastic critical boosters, like dave kehr, do the films a disservice by trying to apply to them auteurist critical heuristics that typically don't work as well for popular films as for "art" films -- and for not acknowledging zemeckis's mistakes (even within his better films). i think dave kehr's seemingly willful misreading of the ending of BttF comes from a desire to 'recuperate" zemeckis according to a set of standards that doesn't really fit. similarly i think his attempts to find robust thematic continuities between, say, BttF and BEOWULF and FLIGHT--and thereby to create a traditional "auteur profile" for zemeckis-- tend not to highlight what is most interesting about those films.

a guy who lives a block or two away from me drives a delorean. it sounds like shit when it drives by.

― jim in vancouver, Wednesday, July 20, 2016 6:02 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha if this is in mt pleasant (which i vaguely recall you saying so) i think we used to live about a block away from each other

It sounds like you are doing "the films a disservice by trying to apply to them auteurist critical heuristics that typically don't work as well for popular films as for "art" films" xp

xp. ha, yeah it is and there can't be more than one in the neighbourhood.

I do think the ending to the first one - and the whole plot of Marty having to get his dad not to be a wimp - is sort of a misstep, or maybe I just don't quite agree with its values. Would prefer a version where Marty discovers his dad wasn't a wimp, and it makes him reconsider the reductive, teenaged kind of way he's judged his parents. Maybe Dad actually used to be a hot-rodding cool kid, kinda like Marty, and Marty witnesses (but doesn't influence) him choosing to give that up for whatever good reason, and that's why his dad is the boring uncool dad he's got now. Because basically his goal in the past, plot-wise, should be undoing the damage he did by arriving there, to restore the status quo - and the thematic match for that is for him to realize that the status quo isn't so bad, that his parents are good people, etc. I dunno, I'm rewriting huge swaths of the movie here and maybe this version would be kind of lame but it's just sorta weird as written, idk. Also like, so if his parents don't get together, Marty gets erased from existence - but if they get together as completely different people and lead completely different lives, he's totally unaffected?

This is a good idea for a re-make btw.

It sounds like you are doing "the films a disservice by trying to apply to them auteurist critical heuristics that typically don't work as well for popular films as for "art" films" xp

― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, July 20, 2016 5:51 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

explain....

the contrast with 'art' films made by people who are not doing the same things with e.g. narrative. Rivette isn't seeking to point the camera/pace a scene in the same way as Zemeckis in the first place so saying R might not be a 'natural' doesn't make a lot of sense.

rivette makes narrative films though. they are just unusually attenuated (and sometimes obscure) narratives. in fact i'd say that compared to someone like godard, rivette is profoundly interested in telling stories.

whatever, this is kind of a distracting argument. i recognize that zemeckis and rivette are after different things. i just happen to think that at his best zemeckis is much better at realizing his ambitions than rivette is at realizing his. but i recognize that you can't make that sort of comparison without a ton of caveats so it's probably best not to make it.

I watched the first BTTF last night with my 8yo daughter (she loved it) and agree that it's structure and execution is a marvel of economy and inventiveness. It does feel of a piece with Ghostbusters in that it doesn't really hew to any conventions/doesn't make sense on paper and feels sort of sui generis - both are comedies without a lot of actual jokes, rely heavily on the dynamism of the cast, lean on goofy sci-fi tropes, with some action sequences thrown in.