This is the thread where we discuss matters pertaining to the detrius that accompanies the "End of the Year in Cinema" -- 2022

it was entertaining enough for a night at the movies but i thought it was trying to punch way above its weight with what it was Trying To Say, i found the critiques unsatisfying and not v coherent (in other words nothocked to see Adam McKay's name in the credits.) overall a lot less fun than a movie about a homicidal haute cuisine chef should have been. would have been much more enjoyable and a sharper satire imo if it had let itself be a blumhouse b movie about wealthy people getting offed one by one in creative restaurant-related ways. isnt there some famous saying about what should be done with the rich?

I think that's the movie many expected.

TIL that any and every sequel or pseudo-sequel can get nominated only for Best Adapted Screenplay, not Best Original Screenplay.

I've had a couple friends prefer The Menu to Tar among rich-privileged-people-are-bastards movies. The latter, I guess, makes its obvious points in a crisper way; it's obvious why it's the far bigger hit.

The latter or the former?

Ha! The Menu, sorry.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYjdjZDczYWYtZjU5Ny00ZTY1LTg5YTItY2FiMzM0MzZkOWM4XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjUyNDk2ODc@._V1_.jpg

^^^ I've wanted to watch that one for years

you might need a trigger warning if you are a dog owner!

pics of Robert Morley make me smile

https://i.imgur.com/QCDSrvv.png

The Menu was very enjoyable and completely ridiculous and made no sort of sense and I enjoyed it a great deal and thought it made some decent points (and a few very glib ones) - I went into the cinema with no expectations and walked out thinking "what the fuck have I just seen?" and sometimes that's more than enough.

THE MENU sucked, prestige TV ass bullshit

also brad the overwhelming consensus about the cheeseburger is that it looked really awesome

Have not seen The Menu, but I enjoyed Triangle of Sadness. Sure, it makes obvious points about class and wealth, but the characters are fun, and the narrative is artfully constructed.

ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE FOR BEST EDITING BABYYYYYYYYYYYY https://t.co/5HxKVjVvMT

— Michael Christie 🦑🧲🐸🦛 (@mschristie587) January 24, 2023

I expected the Menu to be much dumber than it was, because I didn't think the marketing for it was very good. I was pleasantly surprised by the performances in it which were across the board excellent. I'm surprised to hear that anyone else may have thought Pig was dumb though, that was also one of my favorite movies of the previous year and one that I thought was really overlooked at awards season.

I think I prefer the Menu to Triangle of Sadness, in the end.

sure

Still haven't seen most of the films discussed here, including Triangle of Sadness, which I'm looking forward to. The Menu doesn't interest me as much

RRR was fun, but was way too long for what it was

thought this was an interesting article

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/24/dining/noma-fruit-beetle-fine-dining.html

Kind of agree with this deleted Peter Labuza tweet:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FnQDYu4aEAQO9aX?format=jpg&name=900x900

It's been a long time since I saw Eternal Sunshine, and I suspect that I might not love it as much as I did when I was 25. It's also not exactly the same movie, obviously.

But my main complaint about EEAAO is that the emotional thread felt kind of flimsy and obscured by the whizbang multiverse stuff rather than enhanced by it. I was rooting for the family in a general sense, but the characters and relationships weren't nuanced or grounded enough to give it much emotional payoff at the end.

I very much do not agree with that.

yeah the key to the movie for me was how detailed and true to life the family relationships were, just on a personal basis it seemed like a kind of life I know personally and haven't seen represented at all.

agh, too many personals, but just the everyday struggle to keep on top of life and the chaos and constant worry that things are falling apart, the striving to provide and taking care of older relatives, and people are not cool or confident or sassy, they're all only just about holding it together in their own ways and are unable to easily empathise with each other even though we're all in the same boat, because we're too busy dealing with our own shit, that speech about emotional strength is exactly the one I've tried to have with my wife so many times - and seeing all of this represented not as a dour drama that nobody will see but as a mainstream movie everyone is watching, it's just one of the best things that happened in 2022.

Lydia Tár belittled a pangender BIPOC student. She groomed young women. One of them committed suicide.

This morning she got multiple Oscar nominations. Please tell me again how cancel culture is real.

— Nick Newman (@Nick_Newman) January 24, 2023

Keep the bad tweets coming

There's a segment of Film Twitter that's so irony-poisoned it's stifling (I know this is not exclusive to Film Twitter).

agh, too many personals, but just the everyday struggle to keep on top of life and the chaos and constant worry that things are falling apart, the striving to provide and taking care of older relatives, and people are not cool or confident or sassy, they're all only just about holding it together in their own ways and are unable to easily empathise with each other even though we're all in the same boat, because we're too busy dealing with our own shit, that speech about emotional strength is exactly the one I've tried to have with my wife so many times - and seeing all of this represented not as a dour drama that nobody will see but as a mainstream movie everyone is watching, it's just one of the best things that happened in 2022.

― Camaraderie at Arms Length, Wednesday, January 25, 2023 1:14 AM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Would love to see this movie without all the "Marvel bullshit."

Yeah but that approach could be its own problem. I said this on FB in a thread about the film yesterday:

...(imagine if) it kept the same general cast and setting it could have in other hands and in other times been nothing more than a vaguely worthy Oscar-bait drama, one that Hollywood would use to pat itself on the back that they're 'telling these stories now' -- a very 90s kind of nominee in turn, maybe the space (from lack of multiverse etc) would have been filled in with a 'wacky but loveable' laundry patron with a catchphrase or two, etc. etc. Maybe it could work that way, maybe it would be just dull.

And I'll add now I'm willing to believe it would be very earnest and very dull that way! That Daniels are clearly incredibly visually oriented by default is a major plus.

Separately, saw this new All Quiet on the Western Front: I do wonder if being very familiar with the original 1930 movie as well as having read the original novel shapes my thought on it. I agreed with a friend that the real pathos of those versions is lost in the new plot construction here. Essentially I wasn't feeling the running subplot of the official armistice negotiations and the actions of the German general and all that -- the point of the book/original movie lies in the ground's eye view, and the novel and original movie both end some time short of the actual armistice, so the dynamic is different in key ways in this one. Still, it did do a lot of riffing on many of the key 'set pieces' of the core narrative -- the 'food for 150 men but only 80 here' part, the torn poster, etc. and that was nice to see; certainly gruesome at many points, it's no more or less artful/realistic than 1917 visually, and no one-take gimmick as such applies. And, admittedly, really nice to finally have an adaptation of the story in German. I did find out the 1979 version is on Kanopy over here so I'm going to go back to that in turn at some point; that was the first version I ever saw back when it aired.

The original Milestone film uses the limitations of sound design with imagination; you hear every cry of agony, every muffled cry for help.

many many xps but i also thought of pig when watching the menu, tho the former was vastly better on every level (the menu was fine)

xpost Yeah the sound design has always sat with me from that version. The general lack of a musical soundtrack, careful editing, a bit of diagetic music here and there and attention to detail with the conversations and exchanges, but above all else the impact of every shell, somehow worse in impact and feeling than anything in a modern sound mix.

I haven't watched it yet but all signs point to All Quiet being the very prestige TV version of the material

It's also inescapable that in 1930 the impact of those shells only had a decade-plus to reverberate.

I'd like to think there's a middle ground between the hyperactive, visually maximalist comic-book version and the earnest, dull '90s Oscar bait version of EEAAO. Thinking about the sensibilities of filmmakers like Mike Leigh or Nicole Holofcener, who obviously wouldn't be the right fit for telling the story of this particular family, but who excel at portrayals of families and relationships that are messy and humanistic and leavened by humor. IDK.

But whatever. I didn't actually hate EEAAO, I actually thought a lot of it was pretty fun. I just didn't connect with it on more than a superficial level, and so all of the awards attention makes me a bit grumpy.

I'm glad EEAAO got made, attracted this cast, and was the right sort of movie to draw people into theaters (again and again). It earned its good will. But count me among those exhausted by the 50-minute mark.

I think the problem for me is that something like the buttplug fight is also, just, dull. It might prompt an easy laugh at first, but it isn't interesting or fun to think about later on. Most of the visual gags and action bits in the movie felt like that to me.

The core idea of a family multiverse movie is not the problem, but the flipping between universes starts to feel really excessive and unconstrained at a certain point. To me it would be more satisfying if the travel between universes felt more genuinely clever and controlled (which it is for much of the first half).

This was the rest of my FB comment about that point -- obviously it won't be for everyone, but here's how I felt it:

But the seemingly exhausting overload of all the everything else is something that resonates with me in particular -- obviously I'm not saying I suddenly equate myself with these core characters on a deep personal level, I do not! Their experiences aren't mine. But the quicksilver nature of accumulated cultural imagery and flights of fancy, the what ifs and the surrealisms, how we shape and process it all internally as it all accelerates with time, these have shaped me now for maybe my whole life in a default, and I suspect that's the case for a lot of us one way or another. Watching it was like riding the best rollercoaster ever, the happiest and craziest ride, and with a hell of an emotional undertow at the heart of it all. It wasn't exhausting, it was thrilling, it was like a peek into how the mind works, and it felt like a relief to actually see that being engaged and illustrated, like we don't experience something as one story but multiple ones, and how the serious moments in life can have strange images crowd into our heads unbidden, as much as the silly ones do.

I like how chaotic it is, how this very complex plot is almost left in the background, using ridiculously high-concept fantasy ideas to explore the human condition is an underexploited trope if anything IMO.

Now yes, the buttplug fight, and the hot dog fingers universe and especially the chef with a racoon under his hat were weak parts for sure, but I can accept all as "stuff for other viewers" which is quickly moved on from - I also generally have no time for action movies, especially Marvel superhero movies, but I didn't see much of that at all - it was more like if Stephen Chow made a superhero movie (which would obviously be 1000x better than anything from the MCU) But so much of the self-discovery required this extreme perspective, and some of the fantastic conceits (like when they are rocks) are genuinely brilliant.

I would like a film about this family made by a Chinese Mike Leigh, I might even like it more than EEAAO, but it would be a fundamentally different film.

I'm surprised I haven't seen more discussion of Scott Pilgrim in re EEAAO, since it seems like an obvious precursor in using superhero/fantasy tropes to tell a story about normal people's emotional lives.

Also very well put Ned, great post(s)

But count me among those exhausted by the 50-minute mark.

Too restless by then!

yeah, I tried watching EEAAO on a plane, which was probably not the ideal setting, but I also had to tap out after about an hour. I did feel like there was something to the characters and the story but overall just found it too overwhelming and silly

i found the 2nd half particularly excruciating. it felt like the epic Marvel version of every bad improv show: "ok now suggest an item for us to fight with. BUTT plugs?! haha oh man, this audience tonight is crazy, but ok, you asked for it!!" call me a fun-hater if you must, i dont need it to be some boring Sundance drama, but 2h20m of LOL Random Epic Zombie Bacon: The Movie was... not for me

butt plugs was from the first half, also fuck off

sorry CaAL. ive done a lot of talking, now its time to do some listening and make room for healing, i hope we can all grow from this experience of me forgetting which part of the movie had the butt plugs

There's a segment of Film Twitter that's so irony-poisoned it's stifling (I know this is not exclusive to Film Twitter).

― Chris L, Wednesday, January 25, 2023 6:31 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

it's the worst aspect of film twitter, so much of it comes off as dead-eyed sociopath anti-discourse

very very not exclusive to film twitter obv