Films You've Seen Recently and Don't Know WTF to think

muser

Well-known member
did people not get upset and stone the documenter to death?

Nope there wasn't any stoning but to be honest the after talk and questions were carried out in Vietnamese and Japanese neither of which I had a anywhere near good enough level to understand. was a tad disturbing seeing him suddenly appear in the flesh though.
 

version

Well-known member
Started My Dinner With Andre last night. It's alright, but I find both actors and characters grating. I can't work out whether Wallace Shawn's awful, or whether he's supposed to be doing lots of forced laughter and expressions. His end of the conversation also doesn't feel genuine at all. Feels like he's giving a lecture to the audience rather than engaging with the person in front of him the way Andre is. The observations they're making all seem pretty obvious too. Maybe it was a bit more impressive at the time. My current feeling is it's essentially the scene in the bar from Fight Club where Brad Pitt talks about consumerism stretched out to the length of a film. The duvet/electric blanket thing in particular.
 
Started My Dinner With Andre last night. It's alright, but I find both actors and characters grating. I can't work out whether Wallace Shawn's awful, or whether he's supposed to be doing lots of forced laughter and expressions. His end of the conversation also doesn't feel genuine at all. Feels like he's giving a lecture to the audience rather than engaging with the person in front of him the way Andre is. The observations they're making all seem pretty obvious too. Maybe it was a bit more impressive at the time. My current feeling is it's essentially the scene in the bar from Fight Club where Brad Pitt talks about consumerism stretched out to the length of a film. The duvet/electric blanket thing in particular.

I like it, André is blackpilled to fuck, he can see all the way to the bottom. Wally doesn't want to look. That's the tension.
 

version

Well-known member
I'll see how I feel when I finish it. I watched about an hour of it. Best bits thus far were Andre talking about Wally's electric blanket and those people burying him alive.
 

version

Well-known member
The point they make about being incapable of genuinely expressing anything, friends just cracking jokes at dinner as normal rather than asking how Andre was after the death of his mother, still holds up.
 

entertainment

Well-known member
Started My Dinner With Andre last night. It's alright, but I find both actors and characters grating. I can't work out whether Wallace Shawn's awful, or whether he's supposed to be doing lots of forced laughter and expressions. His end of the conversation also doesn't feel genuine at all. Feels like he's giving a lecture to the audience rather than engaging with the person in front of him the way Andre is. The observations they're making all seem pretty obvious too. Maybe it was a bit more impressive at the time. My current feeling is it's essentially the scene in the bar from Fight Club where Brad Pitt talks about consumerism stretched out to the length of a film. The duvet/electric blanket thing in particular.

I hated that one but tbh I don't think I got very far. From the beginning I immediately thought that the director was a theater nerd and that he should have just made it a theater play. It put me off to the whole thing, for some reason I have this great distaste for theater people
 
I'll see how I feel when I finish it. I watched about an hour of it. Best bits thus far were Andre talking about Wally's electric blanket and those people burying him alive.

I watched it stoned in the dead days between Christmas and New year a few years back, with the waves thundering in outside. It's not a casual watch. My dad wouldn't like it.
 

version

Well-known member
Yeah, definitely feels like something written for the stage. I dunno that Malle ever did any theatre work though and it wasn't him that wrote it..
 

version

Well-known member
Finished it last night. The second half was much better than the first. The bit about inventing a new language, the pockets of light and New York being a concentration camp made me think of Luka's quest to build The Compound.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Just strapping ourselves in for Balabanov's Cargo 200 - I really like his films but never dared watched this one cos of it's fearsomely bleak reputation.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Yesterday we watched Possessor which is the first (I think) film from David Cronenberg's son... thoughtful sci-fi in which the main character's assassin personality is injected into people who are used to murder someone and then kill themselves. But it was a mess... the pacing was weird, it was confusing - especially cos it suffered from something i notice a lot these days where the music and noises are loud but conversation is impossible to catch - and moments of really horrible violence were thrown in to keep your attention. And then it just finished. Shame cos it felt there was something in there somewhere.
 

version

Well-known member
Morvern Callar (2002)

Didn't realise this was Lynne Ramsay until just before sticking it on. I remember watching Ratcatcher in a film class in school and being bored to tears. I did like the shots of the wheat field though.

DZ0-F-ck-XUAYc-U7z.jpg


Morvern Callar was alright, but the character was a little frustrating, also the dialogue was so quiet I had to have subtitles on. It referred to a bunch of the songs that played as "trance music" too. That scene with the Lee Perry tune, Hold of Death, "trance music plays"...

I read a few reviews once it'd finished and someone mentioned the "moral ambiguity" of Morvern, but I think that's being generous. I mean she left her boyfriend's dead body in the flat for God knows how long, chopped him up and buried him without telling anyone what happened, nicked the money he left for his funeral, nicked his novel, dragged her friend out of a hotel in Spain then left her alone in the middle of nowhere and took 100k off a publisher for a book she didn't write. I dunno that you can write all that off as morally ambiguous. That being said, I didn't get the impression the audience was supposed to be judging her. Just observing.

One thing I did like was the contrast between Scotland and Spain. The moment they get off the plane's like going from black and white to colour. Also the party scenes are well done. That shot of her lifting her skirt at the passing fisherman's really eerie, like seeing a ghost on the shore.
 

muser

Well-known member
I liked Morvern Callar, i remember the sound track being good and liking that mamas and papas track a lot because of it.
 

version

Well-known member
I found the soundtrack a bit awkward. Maybe it came across differently in 2002, but to me it felt like it'd been put together by Pitchfork or something. Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Stereolab, Can, Broadcast, Some Velvet Morning. Lots of very obvious "cool" music. I do like that Lee Perry tune that isn't actually a Lee Perry tune though.


Apparently it's actually by a guy called Mike Brooks and there's an alternate mix on a Revolutionaries album/compilation called Channel One Revisited Dub. It was mistakenly released as a Lee Perry thing on an album called Blood Vapour.

 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I'm Thinking of Ending Things - weird and good atmosphere and so on but the ending struck me as more silly and profound and it ultimately undercut a lot of what had gone before I thought, without resolving anything in any satisfactory way. I don't demand answers in a film but sometimes you feel that the hand has come of the wheel a bit and things are just happening. But I enjoyed the preceding two hours (it's a long film) so I don't want to slate it.
 
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linebaugh

Well-known member
Morvern Callar (2002)

Didn't realise this was Lynne Ramsay until just before sticking it on. I remember watching Ratcatcher in a film class in school and being bored to tears. I did like the shots of the wheat field though.

DZ0-F-ck-XUAYc-U7z.jpg


Morvern Callar was alright, but the character was a little frustrating, also the dialogue was so quiet I had to have subtitles on. It referred to a bunch of the songs that played as "trance music" too. That scene with the Lee Perry tune, Hold of Death, "trance music plays"...

I read a few reviews once it'd finished and someone mentioned the "moral ambiguity" of Morvern, but I think that's being generous. I mean she left her boyfriend's dead body in the flat for God knows how long, chopped him up and buried him without telling anyone what happened, nicked the money he left for his funeral, nicked his novel, dragged her friend out of a hotel in Spain then left her alone in the middle of nowhere and took 100k off a publisher for a book she didn't write. I dunno that you can write all that off as morally ambiguous. That being said, I didn't get the impression the audience was supposed to be judging her. Just observing.

One thing I did like was the contrast between Scotland and Spain. The moment they get off the plane's like going from black and white to colour. Also the party scenes are well done. That shot of her lifting her skirt at the passing fisherman's really eerie, like seeing a ghost on the shore.
I liked You Were Never Really Here and We Need To Talk About Kevin. Both those movies also have problems with obvious 'cool' choices (though not necessarily soundtrack). YWNRH was weird in that I'm not sure any of its really conspicuous attempts at abstraction and experimentation completely land but it still manages to stay engaging throughout.
 
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sus

Well-known member
I'm Thinking of Ending Things - weird and good atmosphere and so on but the ending struck me as more silly and profound and it ultimately undercut a lot of what had gone before I thought, without resolving anything in any satisfactory way. I don't demand answers in a film but sometimes you feel that the hand has come of the wheel a bit and things are just happening. But I enjoyed the preceding two hours (it's a long film) so I don't want to slate it.

Yeah I found the ending really disappointing. The weird identity slippages, things just slightly off in unidentifiable ways, the uncanny line between creepy and endearingly awkward, all seemed interesting and then...
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Watched The Other Lamb last night about a small cult of blue-robed daughters and red-robed wives gathered around their 'shepherd'... living in the woods, distrusting periods, it focuses on one young woman and her visions as they trek across stark yet picturesque scenery. Interesting ideas I suppose but ultimately too slight to sustain the ponderous pace and confusing story.
 
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