Labor Day

Started by picolas, January 29, 2014, 11:27:51 PM

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picolas



very strange.

reitman makes sure everything is visually slick/polished and keeps a steady narrative momentum throughout, so labor day never feels dead. and kate puts the wins in winslet as per usual.

the kid is technically good at conveying stuff, but otherwise flat. much like the whole movie. i didn't understand why everything was framed from his perspective, especially relative to kate who has a far more interesting journey, and most of her major turning points happen offscreen. it's like they couldn't figure out how to show such an unlikely romance blossoming so they cut away to a kid whenever it got difficult.

the writing is very expository and odd throughout. no one sounds quite like a real person.

i'm curious about why reitman felt compelled to make this. in the end, it's not really worth your time.

why am i so comforted by james van der beek continuing to get work? i don't know exactly but i am.




****spoilers!!!****

so kate loves josh mainly because it's been a long time since she's been touched... but then she waits for him to get out of prison for more than 25 years.. and we're supposed to feel good about that? basically she gets really lucky and finds someone who can express love without requiring her to leave the house and she never has to abandon her fear or change. it's a terrible message.

and josh brolin is kind of innocent.. a twist that makes the movie way less interesting. if he was actually a murderer or had been falsely convicted or something like that, there would be more to chew on. instead it feels like the movie is being inoffensive for the sake of inoffensiveness.

jenkins


Ghostboy

Quote from: picolas on January 29, 2014, 11:27:51 PM

why am i so comforted by james van der beek continuing to get work? i don't know exactly but i am.


I know!

jenkins

in celebration of his achievements, labor day is the honorary title for any day in which a person chooses to watch a jason reitman movie

(i've bolded my favorite zings)

QuoteIn truth, Men, Women & Children, like such predecessors as American Beauty and Little Children, is concerned almost exclusively with white, middle-class suburbia, which it perceives as thoroughly debased—in this case, by the pernicious influence of the Internet, with its attention-usurping tweets and texts, its time-sucking MMORPGs, its libido-warping hardcore pornography, etc. etc. OMFG STFU.  Narrated by Emma Thompson, who recites "shockingly" frank and vulgar text with ironically cultured placidity, the film flits back and forth among an unnamed city's troubled residents: a married couple (Rosemarie DeWitt and Adam Sandler) whose nonexistent sex life leads her to the affair-hookup site Ashley Madison and him to a high-priced escort; a teenage girl (Kaitlyn Dever) whose paranoid mom (Jennifer Garner) obsessively tracks her every move online; a porn-obsessed boy (Travis Tope) who's so consumed with ostensibly deviant acts (basically just mildly masochistic JOI, i.e. jack-off instructions) that he can't have vanilla intercourse with the school hottie (Olivia Crocicchia); and many more.

Individually, each of these mini-narratives is at best egregiously tone-deaf. Intercut to form an alarmist state of the union address (complete with a pretentious framing device involving Voyager 1's journey beyond our solar system), they collectively cross the line into outright laughable (<-- accidental compliment imo). Reitman has never exactly been renowned for his subtlety, but between this ghastly misfire and Labor Day, he seems to have completely lost touch with any notion of how human beings actually behave; this is the kind of film in which a passionless marriage is signified by scheduled sex, complete with graceless lines like "It'll have to be quick." The talented ensemble cast—which also includes Dean Norris, Judy Greer, Ansel Elgort, and Dennis Haysbert—tries to keep these caricatures vaguely human, but it's hard to give a performance with little SMS bubbles and Twitter timelines constantly popping up over your head. Men, Women & Children is particularly hard on the middle group, repeatedly suggesting that poor mothering is to blame for what ails this community, whether that involves being overprotective, overindulgent, or just plain absent. Mostly, though, the movie just comes across as a borderline-hysterical screed—the Reefer Madness of the Internet Age. (lol)

http://thedissolve.com/features/postcards-from-tiff/741-day-3-men-women-children/