I couldn’t avoid some glibness because the movie imo is too preoccupied with its own cleverness and concerned with its camera gimmicks and sound design and aesthetics of flattening out drama in observation of its monsters and the self-conscious meta-querying of “how to do a Holocaust Film” post-Schindler’s reassessment by some as being too Hollywood melodrama/trauma porn that it ends up an intellectual exercise hollow enough to ring out with the tritest of "ah-ha"s based on the majority of reviews I see that don’t amount to much more than Spielberg’s, “It’s doing a lot of good work in raising awareness, especially about the banality of evil” or “wow the immersion, very clever craft” or “makes you think about the parallels of the todays and us” (or in my case “this is some wanking” because none of these effects worked and I wasn’t left with much else (and maybe I just can’t reconcile this approach with this subject matter)) but like if that was revelatory to someone, good, maybe “feel smarter” wasn’t the right phrase but good.
and I agree with your points after the break I just don’t think this film’s 105 minutes made them very well or grapples with them seriously enough or adds anything and ultimately felt like a self-serving exercise for the filmmakers and probably its audience and like…yeah there are these other manifestations of our fucked up genocidal capitalist crime culture…that cut closer to home without having to fastidiously create an explicitly historically accurate Nazi one…idk. I’m all in favour of telling stories relating to the holocaust of course (the one iguferon posted above immediately sounds more interesting) and yeah drawing those parallels, but this one ain’t it I don’t think
dollman good. pyun was cooking so good in his early career. brick bardo!!!
shout out to this guy, who i recognized as the dude who loves getting electroshocked in dr caligari 1989 while he was laying in a pile of his own innards and painted gray styrofoam blocks
I have deleted several paragraphs as well and thought twice if i should raise my point, so it’s much welcome that you decided to do so, because it is a topic where none of us has participated in or experienced first hand, thank god.
Exactly as you mention — don’t is the conventional wisdom surrounding this topic. And that is why it’s fair to take a step back and look at how it was done … Most in the industry would never touch this topic with a tentpole — even more so with a radical right rising in Yurop and rooting for Trump, plus social media on top for fanning the flames if there is just one tonally ambiguous misstep. Your career is killed if you tread the needle and make just one tiny tonally mistake, so I watch that movie with those thoughts in the back of my mind, and have to muster respect for Glazer deciding to doing it anyway, instead of stepping away (which is the easy option, and I would be the first to do so, make no mistake, since I wouldn’t be able to do this topic justice no matter how much time, money and runway you’d give me).
Lest we forget - and then there's the need for bankrolling the cash for making it, in an industry that currently has such an aversion to risk which we haven't seen for decades, in short, the very existence of this movie and us being able to discuss it is an achievement.
Finally, it's a work of art, to each their own etc.pp, we're old enough to understand that there's no single valid opinion on something irrelevant as a movie, guess this is one of the more divisive ymmv flicks we had for a longer time.
If ever there was a film that exploited its sensationalist Bamboozled trailer hooks to tell a very mundane story about the Black Middle Class it is this one
yeah, the most common and accurate criticism of this movie by far has been that the satire is no longer particularly biting and that it’s just a well acted and well told family story with the source material as framing at the end of the day, which is true, but the movie is still good!
I will weigh in with the brave and iconoclastic opinion that Poor Things and Zone of Interest were both mid but worth watching, and I liked Poor Things more. Very much enjoyed the galaxy brained depiction of Portugal. Like Jean Pierre Jeunet after a righteous trepanation.
2023 horror comedy. It’s more funny than scary. A racist board game tells everybody at a party to name five black actors who appear on the TV show Friends or their friend Morgan dies. That oretty much sets the tone, and it maintains for the whole hour and a half. Also it’s refreshing to not have a movie over two hours in 2023. Very recommended.
Yeah, it was a blast from the past. Whole movie was about what experiences are culturally signified as black, and how attempts to measure that can be fucked up, and it was the basis for a lot of funny and scary situations.
I kept annoying fiance by describing parts of Forrest Gump, which he’s never seen, to him very poorly by memory (please, he’s a simple man, you have to understand, but he sees it all so clearly, it’s really america’s the tin drum in a way…), so we watched Forrest Gump and wow is that a bad movie
yeah idk, the only adult I’ve ever known who liked forrest gump was my highschool german teacher, an austrian immigrant who was totally in love with the concept of America. an upshot of which being that to this point I’d only ever seen it in german. lauf, forrest, lauf!
