David Chase, "The Sopranos" creator, to return with a movie 'about a bunch of guys who form a rock band in the 1960s.'

aka 'That Other Thing You Do'

this makes sense as music (esp classic rock) was always a big part of the sopranos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=859-qjg12bI

hmm

why did this take so long to get made?

Music punctuated by violence vs. violence punctuated by music. Hope a young Tony Soprano shows up in the last scene.

hope this answers the question of what happened to the russian from 'pine barrens' ffs

I've seen one Sopranos ep, but reviews on this are pretty encouraging

trailer looks good!

lol Morbz

material of this seems kind of tiresome (the SIXTIES! ROCK!) but everyone involved is top-notch so will def see it

I grew up where that show was shot, which played the major role in my avoidance.

Good piece on its soundtrack and the history of needle-drops:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324355904578157461773820432.html

I missed this thread -- this looks v cool!

that kid looks like a cross between young Dylan and Syd Barrett. I'm IN :) wondering if the time taken to put it together had anything to do with music clearance?

a Real Jersey Movie. esp the Thanksgiving kitchen fight.

Bella Heathcote can actually act, and elevated the romance.

You musos will go crazy over the period details n' shit.

Some very funny lines, then some (from the protagonist's mom) out of an Italian-American sitcom.

And it's about the most dumb/naive people, teenagers, and seems to last forfuckingever.

Excited (I think).

i'll see anything david chase does so

this was amazing

how?

The fact that they released it without a title is pretty amazing in and of itself.

It's approach. The rhythm. That in the moment thing. xpost

someone must have said this before but it's p good - chase said on charlie rose that "the whole thing abt rock 'n roll in the 60s was if you werent a jock it finally became a way for you to get girls and to prove to your father that he was full of shit"

this was good btw (and i dont care abt the music)
kinda think it's smart abt the passage of time & that that is a theme, but it's "rythms" so to speak, scene-to-scene take some getting used to
& i loved the end

but it's "rythms" so to speak, scene-to-scene take some getting used to

yeah. think there were a few too many elegaic close-ups towards the end throwing the pace off, only gandolfini's of which were merited.

mods really dont wanna put title on thread

hmm, I do care about the music and never get tired of "the SIXTIES! ROCK!" but this looks pretty awful. I could give a crap about kids coming of age in Jersey.

It is that but it's better than that. I think all those elegiac close-ups are there for a reason.

This movie was in its own sealed-off way pretty awesome.

w/out giving this film too much credit, every auteur worth a damn (and several who aren't) have a 'sealed-off' quality

Jim DeRogatis -- not a film critic, mind you -- HATED this movie:
http://www.wbez.org/blogs/jim-derogatis/2013-01/david-chase-wallows-rock-nostalgia-and-clichés-104736

I agree with him in theory on the uselessness of stroking these particular mythologies, but this movie does it way better than the other two movies he cites (That Thing You Do and Almost Famous).

Meanwhile ... ouch.

I'd say it's about on the level of AF if less "phony" (which counts for little).

Gimme I'm Not There anytime.

It's weirdly showing only in suburban theaters in Chicago except for one non-art theater here.

Can only imagine the hype around this if it were an HBO movie for broadcast instead.

This was by far the least awful-looking trailer at the last movie I attended, which is saying very little.

Gimme I'm Not There anytime.

http://patrick.net/forum/content/uploads/2012/11/parrot.JPG

i dug this~

We see the pay-your-dues lecture from the smarmy, sleazy music-biz suit (Brad Garrett).

heh, i thought that guy was just spittin plain truth at them!

it sounded like derogatis wanted something more exuberant. what i liked about the movie is it wasn't very pushy about trying to make you feel the magic of the time, its more like a wry, somewhat-embarrassed-but-also-fond look back. you're not supposed to pump your fist and go 'yeah!' at the twerpy dostoevsky line. it's a funny movie! some of the quiet character moments were almost a little too oblique - i'd love to read something examining those bits of the movie - but i liked the observational approach of the film

i really liked molly price as the mom. her jersey-ness seemed pretty authentic (unlike jack huston's)

here's the chase interview drogatis mentions, its a chill read:
http://www.thewrap.com/movies/column-post/david-chase-everybody-told-me-not-make-movie-70506?page=0,0

tbrr derogatis is a terrible hack

i had to turn this off halfway through - terrible

pacing was just so broken; and all this missing information i didn't understand at all. who are these characters? what are their names again? what am i supposed to be inferring about the girl's sister? let's have a short, cryptic, melancholy conversation / then the band playing / then james gandolfini brooding / then another short, cryptic, melancholy conversation!

far from terrible

Was this ever released nation wide? I know it's not running near me.

it expanded to 500+ theaters in January and went kerblooey.

just saw this. pretty good, not great. definitely supposed to be an embarrassed look back on youth.

Glenn Kenny on JG's really great scene in this.

http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2013/06/james-gandolfini-1961-2013.html

I watched it this weekend, and I got a different vibe from that scene that Kenny talks about. Sure the kid was definitely alarmed by the revelation...but he seemed to react *more* to his Dad using the Mom as the reason he wasn't going to take it any further. The way the kid repeats 'I'll take care of Mom', like don't use her as an excuse not to do anything?

I dunno, maybe I need to watch it again. the write up made me anticipate that scene quite a lot differently to the way it played out, and I don't think the kid comes off as badly as Kenny implies.

But he's otm about how great Gandolfini is in the scene, there's no question there. And it's a nice little movie. It seemed to be edited a little strangely? could've done without the go-go dancing tagline at the end but otherwise it wasn't bad. They must have paid a TON for some of that music.

and I am in LOVE with that kid. cute as hell

I don't think GK found the kid's reaction "bad," just confused and unprepared.

"YOU AND I AH GONNA TANGLE, MISTUH!" - most NJ dads

he had so many good dad lines

I liked him lying on the couch, empty bowl with spoon on his chest, ashing his cigarette into the bowl.

this was an odd little film. RIP Gandolfini :(

this was the worst movie I'd seen in years. since... "away we go," I guess.

basically it was this, but robbed of any redeeming vulgarity: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169528/

just a total nothing.

actual lines include:

- "hey, man. she's stone free to do what she pleases."

- "oh, robert johnson (cut to ostentatious close-up of king of the delta blues back cover). we used to listen to him all the time during freedom summer." (also note forrest gump-esque caricature of white civil rights activists as flighty hippies.)

- "this was before anyone was talking about the sexual revolution!"

- "you must have blown him the night you loaned me 'time is on my side'"

basically there's a line like that every 10 seconds. sometimes entire conversations are a string of similar clichés.

for a "dream project," this was amazingly paint-by-numbers. worse than that. ugh.

lol

also, music cues.

as the errant hippie drives up to her parents' house with a dirty stinky homeless-looking hippie in tow, van morrison: "i can almost smell / your TB sheets"

also: pretty much no soul music. at all. weren't the rolling stones fans listening to otis redding and motown?

i wonder when david chase woke up and thought, "you know that movie that's been 400,000 times? i'm going to make it again, but worse this time."

been MADE

one incongruous use of staple singers-like gospel soul, i guess, during a slow-motion montage

LOTS of ostentatious close-ups of album covers

this is what comfortable, critically-applauded HBO showrunners do during the summer instead of jacking off

"we call them 'african-americans' now, dad!"

20 seconds later: "it's rude to homosexuals, that's why. the new term is 'gay.'"

that's a joke, son!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTwnwbG9YLE

also tons of cringe-worthy cinephilic citations, including girlfriend quoting orson welles. earlier her and boyfriend-protagonist go to see "blow-up." him: "what kind of movie is this? nothing happens." her: "the trees are like... music." (i'm pretty sure this isn't meant to be funny, but rather to reveal her sensitive artiness or whatever.)

also all the original music (esp. lyrics) sounds way more like forgettable '80s indie (rain parade? something more boring than that) than anything from the '60s.

Great film

lol

I didn't love it, but yeah yr fulla shit

this ruled

i dont care about any of the music stuff, its about the people, man

I didn't love it, but yeah yr fulla shit

― eclectic husbandry (Dr Morbius), Thursday, January 9, 2014 6:57 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'll take this as cosmic affirmation :).

i dont care about any of the music stuff, its about the people, man

― Hungry4Ass, Thursday, January 9, 2014 8:58 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what people? all i saw were assemblages of clichés so tired i'm surprised they could stand up

fear not, I will watch this soon and tell everyone what to think.

i admit the weird flight into stylization at the very end was intriguing, if poorly executed, but it mainly functions as a weird nod to "goodfellas" and doesn't change the other 90 or 9,000 or whatever minutes of the movie.

there wasn't a single plot manipulation i didn't more-or-less anticipate minutes in advance, having been exposed to the master narrative of Rock Music and countless films about The Sixties.

i guess every movie deserves a few fans, and you folks are welcome to this one.

the only moment that i remember about this was the band's audition performance, where they hit their peak and got it together and did everything right (for an audience of one bored industry dude), but it's clearly going nowhere except downhill from there. thought it was poignant and well-done.

i'll admit a few of the later scenes w/ gandolfini were slightly stirring in a "boy i wished i had talked with my dad more" b/w "man, james gandolfini died, that sucks" sort of way

haha ryan

i'm looking forward to it :)

lol

finding this so persuasive, this movie did have such a shitty grasp on what relationships are like, like every two-beautiful-models-posing-as-actual-teenage-couple scene is so starry eyed

but yeah i thought it was pretty okay!, for the elegiac nature of gandolfini's performance sure

earlier her and boyfriend-protagonist go to see "blow-up." him: "what kind of movie is this? nothing happens." her: "the trees are like... music."

― ★feminist parties i have attended (amateurist), Thursday, January 9, 2014 3:11 AM (15 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lmao did not make it that far

agree with amateurist that the last few scenes and coda were the best and even intriguing enough for me to want to re-watch the movie as a whole. a strange movie though. I mostly liked it since the 60s stuff was so heavy handed it almost felt like an intentionally gratuitous reflection of boomer self-regard.

iirc the intro & coda was put on there at the studio's demand, wanted to give the audience more context or something

oh that's interesting. I think maybe the stylization of those scenes worked best since the signifiers of cultural mythology that the movie traffics so heavily in seem a bit more dreamlike, almost eerie, rather than "hey remember the 60s?"

also the mother was very livia soprano.

did u like the movie

i liked it

i liked it but am wondering if my crush on the kid clouded my judgement

I mostly liked it since the 60s stuff was so heavy handed it almost felt like an intentionally gratuitous reflection of boomer self-regard.

― ryan, Sunday, January 12, 2014 10:11 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't see how this could be a reason to see it, but to each his own. i'd sub "pathetic" for "gratuitous"

I gave it 3 stars on netflix. we can close the thread now.

actual lines include:

- "hey, man. she's stone free to do what she pleases."

- "oh, robert johnson (cut to ostentatious close-up of king of the delta blues back cover). we used to listen to him all the time during freedom summer." (also note forrest gump-esque caricature of white civil rights activists as flighty hippies.)

- "this was before anyone was talking about the sexual revolution!"

- "you must have blown him the night you loaned me 'time is on my side'"

basically there's a line like that every 10 seconds. sometimes entire conversations are a string of similar clichés.

for a "dream project," this was amazingly paint-by-numbers. worse than that. ugh.

― ★feminist parties i have attended (amateurist), Thursday, January 9, 2014 2:49 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark

i dont know whats supposed to be self-evidently awful about any of these lines btw. ah, the classic You Blew Him The Night You Loaned Me Time Is On My Side cliche... when will they retire that old saw

it's teenagers talking -- they're stupid.

yeah

- "you must have blown him the night you loaned me 'time is on my side'"

lool

This movie was really bad. And it had nothing to do with the dialogue. It was just really vague. I get the feeling it might have made a really god TV series - like, there were lots of elements that could've been good if Chase had had the chance to explore them further. But he didn't, and what was there just did not work.

Like, I haven't even got a clue what the ending was supposed to mean, and the ending was by no means the worst part of the movie.

I was impressed that when they started writing their own songs they went from Stones covers to being The Replacements though.

if it were just stupid teenage talk, i wouldn't mind. approximating teenage conversation would actually be an achievement.

instead, it's stupid screenwriter talk.

a lot of those lines have teenagers in 1966 spouting clichés about The Sixties in language that wouldn't be born until years later. like a lot of films, this one grants its characters a kind of totalizing historical self-awareness that rings false. (see also the way the film suggests that awareness of civil rights, in the line of one of the protagonist's kid sisters, just kind of bleeds directly into the sort of politically-correct anti-homophobia that's the norm today. there's a weird telescoping there that seems to imply that the baby boomers are responsible for all the social advances of the past few decades.)

also the way that music is the central thing in our lives, man theme is integrated into film is incredibly heavy-handed. it doesn't give you any room to breathe, in fact. i found it insulting.

the filmmaking was pretty tired too. a lot of quality-TV-like "cinematic" chiaroscuro and stuff but staging/framing/editing showed no invention or excitement whatsoever. so really i just felt like there was little or nothing to chew on.

i'm not going to persuade anyone who loved or liked this film to change their minds, least of all the sort of folks who double-down on their opinions when they are challenged (I'm often in that group). so that's cool.

I was impressed that when they started writing their own songs they went from Stones covers to being The Replacements though.

yeah, that's a good reference point. the lyrics+music sounded more like an 80s indie band inspired by 60s bands than an actual 60s band. the specific sort of self-absorbed, lightly ironic relationship drama limned in the lyrics felt anachronistic.

nice post m8

i can't tell when people are being sarcastic anymore :(

im serious, that was a good post!

its just funny because i read it as being more self-effacing than trying to enchant you with boomer myths, tho i guess the dialog is glib - i barely ever notice bad dialog - but i think that's a strength of the movie too in a way, it maintains a little bit of distance from the realtime urgency of whatever they're talking about, its more just about the vibe of vaguely/fondly remembered embarrassing episodes recounted in a low-key way

i thought the sense of place & time was pretty cool too

music is the central thing in our lives, man theme - i didnt think the movie was insistent about this at all