Adam McKay's World-Ending DON'T LOOK UP (2021)

Whenever I hear about this movie I get sophisto-Bowie's "Don't Look Down" stuck in my head.

Anyway, anticipating!

oh this is on my movies i’m going to avoid list, looks like total dogshit

I keep thinking it's a movie about Bob Dylan.

"Cynically nihilistic black comedy by Hollywood A-Lister" is probably one of my least favourite movie genres of the last thirty years (Coens excepted)

After spending 115 minutes pointing a ham fist at the stupidity of all the characters they exhibited, the final 5 minutes wrap it all up with the heartwarming moral of the story: love and kindness make us better people.

Thought Mark Rylance was amazing in this, in all his odd cadences.

Something I haven't seen mentioned is that this was clearly being made before the 2020 election, and in some ways it seems made for an audience having to live through a Trump second term.

Felt just right for a Christmas movie for people isolating and waiting out a Covid case.

Reposting from Netflix thread: watched it on a lonely Xmas eve and enjoyed it much more that I expected to. Pretty shambolic and full of jarring changes of tone but pretty funny throughout. As already posted, the Rylance character was pretty incredible.

Rylances performance was a exact reprise of his character in Ready Player One?

Never saw it, but he’s doing some things with rhythm and line readings that I’ve never seen before.

We watched this at my mother's request. Didn't enjoy the movie, but I am curious as to exactly when this was made.

iirc it was supposed to be out in 2020, but delayed for some mysterious reason.

McKay says that the beginning of production was complicated, considering the lack of COVID-19 testing options; at the time, rapid tests were unavailable. The cast and crew were quarantined, the set was broken into specific zones and everyone wore masks while COVID monitors roamed the set. Once PCR testing became available, McKay says, the filmmakers knew they could successfully pull off a shoot.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/making-of-dont-look-up-adam-mckay-1235060315/

speaking to the cooper performace, guy was COMEDY ACTING in a v try hard way b/w Penn and Waits scene its became a "here's this scene with a guest star in a wig!!! Now here's this scene with a guest star in a wig!" movie for a sec. like we get it you have famous friends, pta.

Oops wrong thread!

what a mess lol. idiocracy vibes but w better ‘politics’. still kind of liked it though. some pretty fun performances.

in other news, i have never found timothee chalamet more attractive than in full dirtbag skater mode so i guess i just need to walk into the ocean

i had a panic attack at the end bc apparently i still cant cope w end of the world movies so that was embarrassing

it wasnt that good tho anyway

re Rylance

he’s doing some things with rhythm and line readings that I’ve never seen before.

He reminded me a little of Eugene Levy's character in "A Mighty Wind."

I dunno, I liked that it took the tropes of science-disaster movies (Deep Impact, Armageddon, Arrival, Contagion) and treated them with a lighter hand and some ott goofballery. I was in the right mood for it, but I can understand if it's just not your thing.

I didn't get Idiocracy vibes, but rather Wag the Dog with a dash of Josie and the Pussycats and Running Man.

thought this was fine, just can’t stand dicaprio tbh

rylanc was like kooky tech weirdo crossed with warhol, it was v good

xposts oh yeah Wag for sure. I’ve never seen Josie or (somehow!) Running Man!

re Idiocracy - I guess I mean something that seems like it was envisioned as fairly ambitious satire but kinda runs out of steam, doesn’t really stick the landing, tonally sort of “off”

How young of a kid would you show this to?

(and obv idiocracy’s politics went to some pretty gross places and here they’re actually Good)

re age - going to leave that to someone w kids but the penultimate scene could be pretty hard to take if you’re invested in the story and characters

enjoyed this

not that he has to but wonder if mckay is ever gonna change up his style at all (tbf hes getting oscar noms so why change i guess) this felt m/l just like vice & the big short and in that lineage its def better than vice and maybe not quite as good as the big short imo

Vice is one of the most grotesque wastes of time, money, digital photography, and Cheney jokes in film history. What a cynical, hateful film.

eephus, an older teenager with the attention span and right sense of humor for it should be okay.

I have a 13-year-old. There's nothing in it I wouldn't want them to see, but I can't imagine them sitting through a movie this long, esp. since it mostly consists of grownups talking.

Like, I doubt a contemporary teenager would be fazed by the language, drugs, smoking, or sexual situations in it. They see all that and far worse on the regular

It might help a kid understand this…

We're now 2 yrs into the decisive decade. Emissions should be in an unprecedented fall, instead we're seeing the 2nd biggest rise ever recorded. We're wasting invaluable time pretending we can solve this crisis without treating it like a crisis. World leaders are still in denial.

— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) December 22, 2021

I've got 30 mins left and I feel dirty and awful watching this empty cynical movie.

just re-watch Melancholia instead, the last act in that movie is one correct approach on how an apocalypse movie should be done. I knew this would be garbage as soon as I saw it was by the director of Vice and the trailer was fucking awful.

The thing that makes climate change different from a meteorite is that its not just about a lack of response to an inevitable disaster; its been actively created by the acceleration of the systems used to run our society.

— BUILD SOIL; Plant Chestnuts! (@BuildSoil) December 26, 2021

The tone of this reminded me of 90s Christian Slater black comedies (specifically Very Bad Things), which always got critically meh’d but I extremely enjoyed. Genuinely laughed at the running Grifter Major gag and was moved by Timothee’s end moment

fabulous hair he's got

Nabokov wrote "satire is a lesson; parody is a game." The movie can't quite decide which one it is.

The darkness / emptiness / cynicism may be cloaked inside the satiric aspect. If you consider it as allegory, well. For climate change? For COVID? But basically I thought of it as critique of the current information environment.

Easy jabs at the Trumps and red-hatters and Tucker Carlson (note the tv personality who is heir to a freeze-dried food fortune) are cutesy larf lines for the movie's presumed coastal liberal audience and, well, why tf not at this point? I mean, it's funnier than "Let's Go Brandon."

I drifted through this a bit yesterday. My brother-in-law asked, about 45 minutes in--seriously, not trying to be ironic at all; he just didn't know--if it was supposed to be a comedy. I liked The Big Short, didn't think Vice was awful; didn't get much out of this. I thought climate change/COVID all the way through (the former for the allegory, the latter for the administration); felt like a whatever-sticks jumble. The last-second punchline was a jolt. I didn't dream about the end of the world, and I should have.

clemenza's brother-in-law otm.

It grows slowly - it takes an hour to become a comedy. For the first half-hour certainly it just looks like a slightly glossier, hipper take on Deep Impact or whatever.

Comedy enters via Jonah Hill and Meryl Streep. Ariana Grande's exquisite entrance is where it starts pressing the accelerator pedal into satire.

Allegory presses the accelerator about two-thirds of the way in (did I mention that this movie is VERY LONG?). Specifically where Hill's character says the quiet part loud, aligning the lower classes with "us, the cool rich" against the liberal elites/science. Streep's rally speech about how the smarties are "looking down their noses" at the red-hatters is heavy-handed... but not inaccurate.

Given the extent to which MAGAnauts are currently structuring their lives around owning the libs, that's like taking aim at the side of a barn and scoring a direct hit. But again, why not have entertainment that reflects that very prominent aspect of the current moment? Surely some smug-ass right-winger is currently writing a script about identifying as an attack helicopter that he thinks will TOTALLY skewer woke culture. McKay might as well fire back.

"might as well" is setting a pretty low bar

perhaps. kudos to you for your high standards

but you realize we're just talking about a video that is on the teevee, right?

sorry i didnt mean to sound persnickety YMP. after hating Vice, i guess i just was hoping this wasnt gonna be direct-barn-hits & am disappointed that that's what it sounds like

okay dude

A climate movie is the #1 most popular film on the world’s largest streaming platform. This is an enormous win. If you can’t at least acknowledge that, then it’s a safe bet that you’re a character in that film.

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) December 26, 2021

god tagging a McKay film with the "important film of our generation" label is really the kiss of death innit

He also produced the movie.

which makes it worse

and yet I think this is very 2020s apt - it's been like three days and the dude has heard enough social-media negativity about his movie so he goes to social media to defensively launch a counterstrike that sounds both defiant and more than a little whiny...

which reinforces my sense that the movie is as much "about" the current information ecosystem as it is "about" climate, COVID, Trump, the 2020 election, or for that matter an actual comet/'stroid/whatever

There are lots of ways to say "we're fucked," and not a lot of ideas for getting the situation unfucked or even a little less fucked. Happy new year ILX!

best bit is when the US bombs the international shuttle program designed to take out the asteroid after it’s been decided that Bash is taking over and you know just going mine it

If you can’t at least acknowledge that, then it’s a safe bet that you’re a character in that film.

if you don't appreciate the enormous significance of this great piece of art being no.1 on netflix, then you see Jonah Hill doing an unfunny comedy ad-lib in a loud annoying voice... that's you that is!

david sirota seems like a mensch to me idk

Wouldn't be the first time a mensch stumbles when facing the realities of commercial filmmaking.

or the first time one makes an overly pompous pronouncement on a message board

You have something against me, map, that's made you a prickly asshole? I intended no insult.

the movie is middling entertainment at best but i expect this to be closer to the reality that plays out in my lifetime than anything forecasted in the Economist or the Post. I mean this shit is happening now, every day.

Nathan Not For You

Nathan No Thank You

I don't think this was very good, but I didn't have a bad time watching it. JLaw and Leo did well. the cynicism and obviousness were sometimes eye-rolly, especially where they got the details wrong. example: it seemed odd to go through with the world coming together in hope, millions in the streets (even if it's ultimately doomed), after a whole movie about how futile it is to reach anybody. would have been more consistent if Leo's big tirade near the end got treated by the disengaged public as just, like, this week's wacky video, people going "it me" for a few days and then moving on. at the same time i'd had about enough of the cynicism, so i was fine with the way the ending shook out. i'm a middle aged person now i guess. it wasn't the worst, but it was wayyyy too long, i'll say that. Wag the Dog is only 97 minutes! Network is 121!

I'm not sure why the average Hollywood flick's running time creeps ever upward.

Because people aren't sitting in a theater next to a half-empty bag of popcorn and a 92-ounce bucket of Sprite?

Mostly we're home. We can pause the movie and go fold the laundry or heat up a burrito or masturbate while thinking about the Amazon delivery person or read the New Yorker or play Candy Crush for a while, then come back to it. Does it matter whether the movie is two hours or three? Not really.

If it were a series we'd probably watch six to ten episodes in chunks of varying length, in between work calls and Amazon deliveries and games of retro Tetris.

Can we, like, speed up this earth-destroying comet now?

Does it matter whether the movie is two hours or three? Not really.

yes it does!

I don't know if movies are getting longer, but it's got to be true that ostensible *comedies* are getting longer. It could be just indulgence (improv-driven or no), it could be lack of screenplay discipline, a lost focus on structure in favor of performances.

a tv show, if I get up and take breaks from it, it's nbd. esp since the episodes are usually bite-sized and individual in nature.

if I get up 2 or 3 times during a movie, it usually dilutes it so much for me that its impact is blunted. i'm the type of dude that when I have to pee at the theatre I'm usually sprinting back to avoid missing anything.

Peter Jackson has a lot to answer for

A lot of these TV shows are more egregious, imo. They're stretched and padded out because they know they have to hit the 10 episode mark. It's only very recently that I've noticed more and more shows varying up their run times. A 40 minute episode here, a 55 minute episode there, etc. TV offers a lot more flexibility, but a lot of these shows play out like over-stuffed movies and might have worked better as such. Whereas from what I gather, something like this movie (or, I don't know, the new Matrix) might have worked better as a limited TV series.

Fair point, your lordship. For persons of taste and discernment, I can see why it matters.

Unfortunately most of us are eating Tostitos and wearing sweatpants and just trying to get through another numbing series of months where time has no meaning and nothing matters. Might as well have 204 or 217 or 223 minutes of Netflix (or whatever) caressing our eyeballs while we wait until it's acceptable to open another box of pinot grigio

Ha! Oat crackers and shorts for me, and, yeah, I don't see why, to Neanderthal's point, running times matter less at home.

yeah but they start to get boring the longer they get

I'd rather rot my brain to two 90 minutes movies than one 2 1/2 hour one

like that last fuckin avengers movie, good god wrap it up nerds!

Hollywood is making movies more intolerably long in order to more quickly transition its audience to watching streaming TV serieses.

that extra scene of Hulk taking a dump really adds to the AVengers lore

https://media2.giphy.com/media/l0HlAzbjC6Vddy5Dq/200.gif?cid=ecf05e476r8vy701n8fcem1ri7hpsks08axvbm5rhgq7jzc8&rid=200.gif&ct=g

Okay. Anyway, people keep saying "cynicism" like it's a bad thing.

I understand cynicism to mean something like "tending to assume the worst about people" or "pessimism re: our fellow humans" or "thinking that people in general will act in self-serving ways as opposed to altruistic ways."

Serious question: given events of the last 7 years or the last 70 years or, heck, the last 700 years, is this dreaded "cynicism" an accurate or inaccurate response to human behavior?

I know this trend started long before the virus but I always wondered if movie theater companies were the ones pushing for shorter runtimes so they could fit in more screenings. it's not like the price goes up if it's a longer movie

i mean you're right, cynicism is pretty warranted rn tbf

I understand cynicism to mean something like "tending to assume the worst about people" or "pessimism re: our fellow humans" or "thinking that people in general will act in self-serving ways as opposed to altruistic ways."

Serious question: given events of the last 7 years or the last 70 years or, heck, the last 700 years, is this dreaded "cynicism" an accurate or inaccurate response to human behavior?

― nonsensei (Ye Mad Puffin),

I regard cynicism as a sibling of sentimentality: embitterment over systems and people not functioning like we expect.

in the world outside ILX I often see cynicism and realism lumped together when a cynic imo is anything but a realist; if she were, they'd stop being cranky.

I regard cynicism as a sibling of sentimentality: embitterment over systems and people not functioning like we expect.

Interesting! Please elaborate.

Surely a cynic would say the opposite. They expect everything to be disappointing and they expect everyone to be shitty, and they are almost always right, so they would argue that they were justified in their cynicism.

you cant be disappointed without first having hope

I know this trend started long before the virus but I always wondered if movie theater companies were the ones pushing for shorter runtimes so they could fit in more screenings. it's not like the price goes up if it's a longer movie

They found a way around that by dedicating more screens to individual films (a three-hour Avengers movie is less of a problem when it's playing on six screens at the googleplex).

In the before times, it could also help drive people to other movies. I finally saw Isle of Dogs after it'd been out a month. The screening was pretty packed up with families (presumably expecting a family-friendly dog cartoon, but that's another story) who I imagine were there because it was the weekend whatever the new Avengers movie was then dropped, and it was block-booked at almost half the screens at the 24-screen theatre. So if you didn't want to see it, but did want to see <something>...hey, here's a dog movie.

I get what you're saying, One Eye Open, but to me, the validation a cynic craves is that of forcing optimists to see the dark truth. To rub our noses in it and shame us for ever having had hope for humanity. The cynic's main joy to tell us how foolish we were, and that they are superior because they had never expected anything but misery.

This is an interesting line of discussion - personally I regard cynicism as a sibling of egotism: wishing to be proven right, and wishing to say "I told you so" to an audience. The audience may be real or imagined but there is an implied audience. It's no fun just to say "I told you so!" to an empty room.

how would you diagnose the pathology of the optimist?

That's easy: thinking Lucy won't yank the football away this time

Anyway, people keep saying "cynicism" like it's a bad thing.

All your examples of cynicism were thoughts. When cynicism moves from one's thoughts into one's actions it is almost always "a bad thing" for whoever else is affected.

Cynicism and idealism seem very related to me

Yep.

They're both about confirmation bias, self-protection, and the inability to integrate contradictory ideas and beliefs.

this would have been better if it had taken a page from Sidney Lumet’s Network and had Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Laurence’s characters blow their brains out on live tv in the first scene

it's so strange to me that this was co-written by (Bernie Sanders' 2020 speechwriter and senior advisor) David Sirota; its ideological perspective is extremely "Trump era establishment lib"

I thought this was a good critique:

But as someone who has worked in political communication and media for a long time, I found the film's focus on communication and awareness to be a strange way to limit the characters' agency.

At the film's outset, when the scientists realize they're being ignored, their first instinct is to go do a big television interview. I'm obviously being a bit literal-minded here, but when scientists are being ignored or censored they usually have more than one media interview they can rely on to get the point across, not to mention lots of FOIA-able documents for investigative reporters and Congressional investigators.

When the scientists decide to blow the whistle and tell the truth, their words take on great power. Jennifer Lawrence's character, telling the truth to a bar full of patrons about the real reason the mission to deflect the asteroid was diverted, sets off a riot. She later joins up with her lefty boyfriend Yule and launches a social media campaign urging people to just look up. Again, it's the power of words and communication that the characters turn to, not the power of, say, advocacy organizations, unions, mass movements, work stoppages, strikes, sit-ins, monkey-wrenching or any other non-electoral forms of intervening in political and capital systems. I get it: it's a comedy. But it's still a comedy operating in the mainstream, liberal Hollywood view of politics, which relies on awareness raising and polite advocacy rather than direct action to get the goods.

Of course, the movie illustrates some self-awareness here: the protagonists hold a benefit concert to "actually" save the world this time, which doesn't help change any politicians' minds, and an actor promoting a film about the end of the world is depicted wearing a button that urges people to look up AND down, neatly avoiding the political controversy over what to do with the asteroid. In one endearing moment, DiCaprio's scientist character is arguing with his trolls online, taking satisfaction in some sick dunks that will obviously have zero impact on policy choices related to the asteroid while his wife rolls her eyes.

Adam McCay, the film's director, acknowledged this a bit on Twitter, too, but for a movie that's so explicitly political, and even tied to a former Bernie Sanders staffer, it's hard not to feel like there are some obvious missing links here — namely our own agency as free people in a democracy — as well as a more robust analysis of exactly who is blocking climate action right now: namely every national-level Republican, Joe Manchin, and the handful of fossil fuel holdouts in the Biden administration who are continuing to kick the can down the road on oil and gas projects.

Didn't mind this the second time through--except for DiCaprio's one big shouting scene, the rest is okay. Embarrassed to say so, but I found a couple of minutes--when they first spot the comet: Lawrence is with skater boy, DiCaprio gets out of his car--somewhat moving. Laughed at Ariana Grande calling DiCaprio an old fuck, also at Streep's admission that she's got her eye on the midterms (the way she delivers the line).

forgot for a moment about ariana grande's "please give me an oscar" performance which dragged on forever

Hadn't occurred to me, but yes, it looks like that is in the running for Best Original Song, and she is one of its credited songwriters (along with Nicholas Britell, Kid Cudi, and Taura Stinson).

(Britell also scored both Succession and this movie.)

Yeah, he's a busy guy.

What we have here is a working definition of the limits of mass entertainment's ability to say something meaningful c. 2022, and I was oddly touched by its failure.

It's that nostalgia for the Big Tent that made it particularly crushing that West Side Story was a dud, both as a movie and "in the conversation."

don't look up
cos you have friends
don't look up
you're not beaten yet

don't look up
they're making sorta crazy sounds

This film was ham fisted but I had a couple of laughs. The entire Ariana Grande bit could have completely been deleted, that sucked chrome balls. I loathe that kind of music.

Probably! That's optimism!

Cool paper on arXiv today on whether we could actually save Earth from an asteroid with just six month's warning, as depicted in Don't Look Up.

Turns out, yes! Probably.https://t.co/qAX9LFolhk pic.twitter.com/VRS4ntovJr

— Jonathan O’Callaghan (@Astro_Jonny) January 27, 2022

So we're okay as long as Elon doesn't discover battery materials or something to mine on an incoming asteroid then.

Ariana Grande's "why don't you mind your own business, you old fuck" was kind of shocking and was pretty good, though

Just watched this. Enjoyed Flop from Bing being the 3rd richest human ever.