darren aronofsky's mother!

yup. really hitting-you-over-the-head with a really non-clever analogy. also the violence was just gratuitous and dumb, not even particularly well orchestrated

Gone all in on the 'biggest mother of them all' approach, I see.

#controversy #mothermovie YOU DECIDE pic.twitter.com/gBSDrD4jnJ

— darren aronofsky (@DarrenAronofsky) September 22, 2017

this movie sounds not interesting in the least but it does remind me i should probably watch Antichrist someday

^ yeah just don't watch it on a full stomach

I think the thing that is most putting me off of this is how much the reviews and the discussion around it are reminding me of Antichrist (which I hated).

i have a friend who watched antichrist on a first date

...and a last date?

i have a friend who watched antichrist on a first date

Oh hell yeah, I assume they're married

For the first two-thirds or whatever, I thought this was an ugly-looking mishmash of better horror films, Rosemary's Baby and Night of the Living Dead most obviously; it held my interest at that level. The last third was preposterous: Cronenberg and Lynch at their most self-parodic, crossed with Ken Russell or somebody like that. I didn't much care for Get Out a few months ago, but after Baby Driver and this monstrosity, it suddenly seems moderately okay.

Michelle Pfeiffer and Ed Harris were good as the Castevets.

"better horror films"--I meant to say exponentially better, or infinitely better.

yeah what did you think of Get Out?

I was intrigued for a while, then I thought it became more and more a conventional--conventionally graphic--horror film. The context was interesting, but the actual experience of watching it became less and less so as it went along.

I think horror films and me may have had our day. It Follows and The Witch were at the opposite end of the spectrum--moody, arty, almost completely without gore--and I wasn't big on them, either.

this only fell off 56% at the US b.o. 2nd weekend, less than i wd've expected (tho i guess it didnt have far to fall)

the vvitch was the best of the last few years' big-deal US horror flicks imho

Otm

Clemenza u should watch The Love Witch

would also watch The Love VVitch

I don't know...I found Viva mind-numbing; I passed when it played here for a couple of weeks.

no idea what Viva is

The previous film by the director of the love witch iirc

ah wikipedia is a little squirrely, all I was turning up was some spanish movie about a drag queen

The Love Witch was fun but it needs an edit so bad

does this movie work as an art movie at all? i just like interesting visuals and sound. if it had a tiny budget and no stars would people think it was so controversial or just another indie flick? i tried scanning this thread for descriptions of what the movie looked like but i couldn't find anything. you are all a.o. scott. kidding.

well scott the cinematographer is DA's usual guy (who also has done a few Spike Lee films, eg Inside Man and Chi-Raq)

imo:

there is some really great filmwork (the slow tracking shots that circle around JLaw, the use of wall color as a narrative device) and some really bad filmwork (the cartoony look and bad CGI of some of the last third)

my ambivalence towards the filmmaking makes me rate below other things I also liked this year, like Raw and Good Time

Yeah, my initial post was about how the movie is so compelling visually, sonically, and psychologically. worth seeing just for that imo. I just don't dig the allegory or what Aronofsky was trying to say. wouldn't have been any different if it were by some no-name director at an empty art house. also, lots of people I expected to totally hate it ended up loving it, the movie is so so polarizing, & I only hate it so much because the allegory is so dumb but visually & sonically it's pretty amazing. go see it!

i think Requiem for a Dream also has that really extreme LOVE/HATE thing for people.

none of the CGI struck me as particularly bad tbh and I'm usually pretty attentive to effects

xp scott seward: yeah there's some amazing shots, tension, etc. A friend actually said to me that this basically is just a generic indie horror flick in a lot of ways, though I would say it's beyond that for the "good" parts. CGI was fine to me. It's the last section that gave me bloodcurdling viewer rage.

visually & sonically it's pretty amazing

this has never redeemed his films before. and his best film (The Wrestler) eschews all that.

The Wrestler looked great!

https://thefilmqueuedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/the-wrestler.png?w=900
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zXgdZ3sjGqM/UzX6tbDEnJI/AAAAAAAARb8/TuLtI8dm9Iw/s1600/The+Wrestler+film.jpg
https://filmgrab.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/01-classroom.png?w=1024

I don't find his films visually amazing. I can't separate visuals from content.

Why is the allegory dumb? The film's theme — how creation and destruction are embedded in each other — is pretty broad and universal. The movie isn't any more explicit than that, and none of the different readings (e.g. it's an eco parable, it's about relationships or religion or parental anxiety or the narcissism of artists) are any more or less valid, which is a neat trick to pull off.

the Wrestler was not flashy or full of editing tricks + CGI the way, say Pi or the Fountain or Noah or Requiem for a Dream were. Visually it's his most understated and conventional film.

xp

I can't separate visuals from content.

^^^also this

As in visuals are part of the content?

the one thing that someone mentioned on here that made me want to see this was the movie BUG which is seriously one of my favorite movies of all time. i've probably seen it 20 times. i would kill to see a genre film even half as good (or crazy) as that in 2017.

this has never redeemed his films before. and his best film (The Wrestler) eschews all that.

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, September 26, 2017 1:00 PM (fifty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I didn't say it redeemed the movie, & I can't separate visuals from content either. But I would still recommend seeing this movie in a theater for the experience & bc I've been wayyyy off on predicting who would love it & who would hate it. I thought It was really shallow upon reflection, but it was a great movie theater experience - packed crowd in a huge auditorium on a Saturday night.

you liked EMOJI: THE MOVIE

um it was called The Emoji Movie

lots of movies have great creativity and quality in their visuals and bad everything else (editing, acting, story etc) so i don't quite get what you guys are saying. are you saying that no movie with great visuals can be truly bad, or that if a movie is that terrible the visuals are irrelevant?

If the movie's terrible, I don't care how well it's shot.

I can take pleasure from evocative visuals in an otherwise ordinary film, and if I really like the look of a movie, that's enough right there to preclude me calling it bad. (Example...lots of them; can't think anything offhand.) But the look of Mother was one of the things I hated most about it; ugly brown and oppressive close-ups the whole way through.

Me at the weekend getting rid of films.
"GREAT film... but I'll never watch it again.
Now this one is total shit... but wasn't that garden lovely, it's a keeper"

p.much! that's why i try to avoid the temptation to buy films these days

I normally go for aesthetics rather than narrative, as I find it speaks to me on a more emotional level. But Aronofsky is someone where the aesthetics often feels cold and technical. And it doesn't help that he insists on aronofsplaining his films afterwards, and how it was meant to be experienced.

I don't get why it's bad to watch a film with a lovely garden, though. That's a totally legitimate response.

Narrative and aesthetics -- I'm not sure how you're defining it -- are indivisible. I can't sever the engine of the plot from, say, how Tsai and Assayas tell and photograph it.