darren aronofsky's mother!

The Wrestler looked great!

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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.

Always intended to see Elvira Madigan, just never have (don't ever remember a theatrical screening here).

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

― Frederik B, Tuesday, 26 September 2017 22:51

Unsure if there was a misunderstanding but I was saying that I was keeping films for things like that, while getting rid of generally much better films that had no visual juice for me.

Like, I think Cold Fish is a superior film to Strange Circus but I'm only keeping Strange Circus for the more bits of juice.

I think the whole movie was just part of Aronofsky's strategy to fuck Jennifer Lawrence, and it was a successful film from that standpoint.

lmao otm

For me it's an allegory about the nightmare that is DIY

Saw this last night after avoiding all the chitchat around it - the above comment on this thread strikes the biggest chord with me, as I experienced the film as a 'property terror' genre piece, like The Amityville Horror - it could just as easily be called 'House!', or 'In Every Dream Home a Heartache'.

The accusations of misogyny strike me as especially witless; the film goes out of its way to critique the expectations put on women to be 'the good mother', the good housekeeper, while the Bardem character is a ludicrous jerk throughout.

Excellent movie.

Saw it. It's actually the Letterboxd MD'A entry I agree with more so than anything...

I don't love mother! for its Deep Meaning, though. I love mother! for its simulation of a rollercoaster that ratchets you uphill for miles, until the lack of oxygen makes you lightheaded, then plummets you at 200 mph through one of those haunted-house rides in which something horrific pops out at you around every turn, except here "something horrific" = humanity.

It's been that kinda year, I guess.

(Except I wouldn't really say I love mother!, tho. Not that that matters.)

At its core, it's a basic, stupid black comedy about the basic, stupid black comedy of people in general.

Would make a good double feature with Paterson.

Marty OTM (on Rotten Tomatoes, at least)

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/martin-scorsese-rotten-tomatoes-box-office-obsession-why-mother-was-misjudged-guest-column-1047286

Or maybe they'll fade away and dissolve in the light of a new spirit in film literacy

sounds likely

his THR editor told him it needed a ray of sunshine

I thought the ray of sunshine was his praise. I would've loved him to write, "Was the film any good? No. It was garbage. Nevertheless..."

Finally watched this today and really quite enjoyed. I guess my biggest complaint is that the allegories were so obvious and directly literal in the last third particularly that it got a bit bogged down in Do You See.

this film was literally so boring. it was just a load of special effects doing bits of the old testament. only highlight was the book publicist shooting people in the head execution-style. That was pretty funny in terms of "character arc". Feel like the lead actress was only scripted to say "what?" and "don't sit on the counter!"

lol best review

at the end of the day, i liked darren aronofsky's mother more than she liked me.

lol @ the lead actress

this movie was great, I don't get all you people who hated it. It was a bit "here is a very blatant metaphor' but I kind of appreciated that. At least it tried.

"A lot of the criticisms are the opposite of how I felt about it. I thought it was deeply feminist and Christian

― Whiney G. Weingarten, "

Yes

We just watched this over two nights. After yesterday we thought it was pretty good, after finishing it today I feel like I've been put through a traumatic experience for no reason, my wife says it was a "parable about nothing." Feel like there's all the ingredients for a great movie in there somewhere, but something's gone really wrong in the cooking, we're all stuck here eating this baby and we don't know why.

I don’t know if “parable about nothing” is really apt for this. I mean I think it’s main fault is in how sledgehammer-y it is with its themes.

My glib go-to on aronofsky’s religiobabble movies is that they are judeo-christian mystery plays rendered as Scientology

Its weird that I felt sledgehammered but at the same time I don't know what point he was making. Stay away from asshole messianic writers? Fans tend to assume they own their heroes too much? Don't let a bunch of weirdos into your house?

fred armisen's impression of kristen wiig is that she's cold all the time and is always looking for a sweater -- maybe the point of the movie is to construct a very elaborate joke about fred armisen's impression of kristen wiig.

He's an artist! *slap* She's a mother! *slap* He's an artist! *slap* She's a mother! *slap*

~spoilers~

He is God, she/the house = Mother Earth, babby = Jesus, etc. Environmentalist movie with biblical underpinnings.

I ignored the religious themes because they were so poorly thought-through, assumed there must be something more to it, reading an interview now it seems that was the whole point of the exercise? So why bother creating characters at all?

why bother doing anything ever

the creation / destruction stuff was just so glib, I assumed it was part of the idiocy of the poet

Does DA think there is a god, but he is a shallow narcissistic asshole? I guess I can be down with that.

is this more or less scary than mike pence’s mother

tell us quickly mrs pence is killing me