eating your way through american midwest - BONES AND ALL, the 2022 cannibal road movie from luca guadagnino

it felt wrong to post about this movie on the call me by your name thread, for whatever reason lol

phenomenal film. has taken up some kind of permanent residency in my mind. i’m no luca scholar but this is his least annoying film i’ve seen. remove all the horror elements and you have a celestially beautiful road movie with an undercurrent of tension and regret guiding events toward their inevitable end a la badlands, add them back in and your main characters spend a great deal of the runtime digging through viscera and having their faces crowned with blood. it just rules

there’s an obvious, easy queer reading (complicated AND reinforced, interestingly i think, by a plot turn in the middle) that can be imposed on this outsider narrative but for me it ended up being a film about how children are ruined, misunderstood, abandoned, corrupted by the adults who are supposed to shepherd them into the world

also: the reznor/ross score is mostly out-of-character—little dusk-lit acoustic guitar figures until uncomfortable dissonances spring up to replace them—and totally shattering

russell/chalamet/rylance are my three favorite performances of the year, all in the same movie

i also loved the way the brief, convulsive dream sequences seemed to be composed of scenes shot for the film but ultimately deleted

*stayin alive voice* bones bones bones bones bones and all, bones and all

OTM, this was very good, with three fantastic lead performances (particularly taylor russell), along with a stacked supporting cast - andre holland and jessica harper were both very good. michael stuhlbarg as the hillbilly cannibal was a fun surprise too.

also really enjoyed the score, which i did not expect to see was by reznor & ross, who i normally am not a fan of. the tension/release of the plucked guitar figures was a perfect fit with the tone and pacings.

if i had a complaint it would be that the big final scene felt a little unnecessary to me. imo it would have been a perfect ending to fade out after the "lets be regular people" scene. the climactic sequence was fine and i still enjoyed it but it didnt add anything imho. but overall i think i loved this.

skipped suspiria but i'm looking forward to this. watched a p good guadagign' recently i am love from 2009. very erotic scene of tilda swinton eating shrimp

seems like an interesting movie. the premise was compelling enough for me to read the plot synopsis and multiple reviews before seeing it. i'm surprised more people haven't critiqued the idea of cannibalism being used as a metaphor for "otherness," which seems to be central to the film.

i think you should watch it

as much as may seem like a problematic metaphor from afar it’s… well it’s just not really a metaphor in the film. it’s so committed to the concept that it made me feel strange new things about queerness and otherness, alongside the characters

as i implied in the opening post you can impose readings of otherness on this but they don’t entirely work… and that is one of the reasons why this movie is, idk, magical lol

it’s about two people trying to understand their shared monstrosity, which isn’t of their own making. that *can* be otherness but it can be so many other things, and also doesn’t have to be about anything other than what it is, and it feels amazing to watch something so free-floating, so resistant to being pinned down, down to its genre

one of the things i love about the film is they keep meeting negative, dark reflections of that monstrosity, e.g. the scene with michael stuhlbarg and dgg

Guess I'm in the minority. I liked the quiet moments, was bored mostly. I'm still weighing how Guadargnino wanted me to respond to the gay pickup scene: certainly it's the first time a closeted gay man has to die so a cannibal has a crisis of conscience.

Sorry, Brad.

honestly as more ppl watch it i expect i will be in the minority

i’m just annoyed that my thread title is missing a “the”

it’s about two people trying to understand their shared monstrosity, which isn’t of their own making. that *can* be otherness but it can be so many other things, and also doesn’t have to be about anything other than what it is, and it feels amazing to watch something so free-floating, so resistant to being pinned down, down to its genre

Agree with your first sentence, but he didn't bring it off. Also: it's a road movie, in which ambiguity rules. The thing is, having liked to some degree every film Guadagnino's made, I've realized after watching I Am Love and Call Me By Your Name again in the last week, how...stiff his rhythms usually are. He'll follow a scene full of promise and portent with a dead one.

Gay Carnival Guy was quite hot, I gotta say. I might've chewed on an ear or two.

along with the obvious queer readings, theres also a grindhouse-literal metaphor for them realizing that it is not possible to move through the world without causing pain to someone at some point, and they meet all these characters who embody different ways of either accepting or avoiding that fact. stuhlbarg and green dgaf and treat it like a game with no consequences, chloe sevingy is eaten alive by guilt, rylance is twisted from living in semi-denial, etc. they all been shaped by their various reactions to the discovery that interacting with other humans is inherently, uh... messy.

god yes booming post

Speaking of, I could barely watch Rylance. What did we think of that performance?

It was a goofy scenery-chewing character actor performance for sure but I liked it - he was as weird as I’d expect of someone who spends most of their life alone with brief interludes of eating dead bodies

i loved rylance’s performance but historically i prefer a goofy scenery chewing character actor performance. from the moment he’s onscreen he exudes an atmosphere

and at least in the first scene you’re not even sure what kind of atmosphere it is, it’s just super unsettling and fills the room like a poison gas

Enjoyed this quite a bit. The couple in front of us said it reminded them of Near Dark, which I could see--I suppose this, in some ways, essentially a vampire film stripped of the supernatural aspects. Likewise, I'd finished the television adaptation of Interview With a Vampire a week ago and this was complimentary viewing, re: coming to terms with this strange desire, the reluctance to kill to live, the comfort/horror of finding others like you that you can't trust because they are like you, etc.

I thought of Bigelow too.

Gotta admit that Rylance's voice immediately made me think of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9t-slLl30E