Back to the Future

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.

http://i.imgur.com/597Cnh6.jpg

Are there any good longreads about the Back To The Future trilogy? Making of, insider gossip, etc. The kind of thing Rolling Stone would do well. Had a brief google but nothing came up.

Not in text format, but the 25th anniversary Blurays have new Making Of documentaries that are way more extensive than those kind of extras usually are, they're pretty informative and fun to watch.

Here's 288 pages worth of great scott: https://www.amazon.com/We-Dont-Need-Roads-Trilogy/dp/0142181536

https://i.imgflip.com/13118b.jpg

Are there any good longreads about the Back To The Future trilogy? Making of, insider gossip, etc. The kind of thing Rolling Stone would do well. Had a brief google but nothing came up.

― NI, Tuesday, September 6, 2016 8:27 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Tom Shone's book BLOCKBUSTER only has one chapter about BttF, but it's a good one, and it's an excellent book overall

bumping this to get a bunch of "B" threads at the top of sna

ah fuck nevermind

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkAVfsw5xSQ

this jam

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.

just a thought, i don't know how it works out, i haven't seen this in years.

… that would treat the trip to the past as a means of gaining access to knowledge that is impossible for marty without the time-travel premise, but that sort of transformation of sympathies would make sense in other, less science-fictional plots where the lesson reality ends up teaching a protagonist is that they've imagined too little, been out of touch with realities because of their constrained sympathies and limited awareness of others.

what the time-travel premise adds is the possibility of acting, of exercising influence over a person in ways one believes are precluded by the defining relationship one has with that person. that's a fantasy; so i would guess that the movie's values have to be reckoned in terms of what showing us marty having his fantasy fulfilled in that way does for the audience's fantasies. in the circumstances where he does get to act, he is exposed unexpectedly to desire (mom) that threatens to undo, in a more profound way, the fulfillment of his fantasy (annulling him i.e. making good on the type of fear that keeps people fixed and satisfying their desires with fantasy rather than reality, because the change they envision is one that comes at the cost of giving up who they currently are), and forces him into having to establish the preconditions for the creation of the (father-son) relationship he sought to escape.

That's really interesting and you're making me change my mind. Maybe it just bothers me that it all comes down to a really reductive "dad throws a punch at the key moment" thing and then we end up with this awful yuppie family at the end, all about the fancy material things they now have as a result. I guess I just feel like there was room in there for Marty himself to do a little more growing or coming to realizations or something. I'm not looking for something as obvious in its character arc as, say, Doc Hollywood (to stick with MJF), but I feel like he's mostly the same kinda unappreciative and superficial dumbass at the end as he is at the beginning. But if you actually put it in front of me, Fox's tremendous charm goes a long way towards massaging that out while the movie's on.

It's a hell of a well-constructed movie and it hits every beat perfectly, but maybe it falls just a little short of doing everything it could with its premise... I dunno.

Oddly enough, "The Power of Love" was playing the other night; someone related that apparently Huey Lewis thought the movie sounded like crap but went along with it anyway. Someone else said that the original script is indeed very different and much crappier (the time machine is a refrigerator, not a DeLorean??) and I wonder, if you saw the basic pitch for Back to the Future in 1984, and maybe it didn't put the "teen confronted with his parents as teenagers" thing front and center... would you think it sounded like a good movie? Or would you just think "ugh, this is some dopey gimmick movie they're shoveling out for the kids," something that would be in the claustrophobic poster thread maybe?

an 80s movie produced by Steven Speilberg was probably a safe bet to make, plot be damned.

In the "making of" documentary on the Bluray, Zemeckis and Gale say that the "teen confronted with his parents as teenagers" was always the main pitch of the movie, and that was why they had such a hard time selling it. Some studios, like Disney, thought the plot was too incesty for them, and some others thought the time-travel gimmick should've been emphazised more instead of the family story. They wrote the script a few years before BttF was greenlighted, and (according to them) it was mostly Zemeckis' success with Romancing the Stone and Spielberg's backing that finally allowed them to make it.

That's helpful, thanks!

Saw this on the big screen tonight

Realised that it is about perfect, far better than I'd ever realised from catching it from time to time on TV/video

Glover is extraordinary across each iteration of George.