2019 Misc

[jenkins]

Oh fuck: Hillbilly Elegy

Its imdb page

Ron Howard director
Vanessa Taylor (The Shape of Water) writer
based on the book by J D Vance

even talking about how this tires me tires me. i'm so tired. let me short story this:

the writer is a white republican from ohio. a yale professor corrected his life course by suggesting he go to yale. he calls himself appalachian and some dispute that, although it is true that large parts of southern ohio echo the culture of appalachia (including within my own family). he broke into the 2016 election scene by speaking of the troubles being faced by the white working class. he said he had trouble understanding how he was a cashier struggling to pay his bills while black people had nice cell phones and food stamps.

he's bad news. solutions to the wrong kinds of problems. fuel for the wrong perspective. this is regressiveness that thinks it's progressive.  this movie is a mistake

the only silver lining is that i was already not into ron howard so that makes not liking this easier

there is a 0% chance i will see this movie ever

[jenkins]

lmao i'd totally forgotten i'd started a cautionary thread about Hillbilly Elegy. i've switched this into a general topic about trash releases in 2019

[jenkins]

this breaks my heart in a different way

[wilberfan]

I see your Addam's Family, and raise you Cats.

[Alethia]

The trailer everyone is afraid to admit made them a tad horny.

[jenkins]

it's actually out already, in limited release, and hulu

it's contemporary pulsed

https://twitter.com/laemmle/status/1162417557887827970

it's very on trend. basically oh a decade ago there was mumblecore, and now there's creative nonfiction, which is like mumblecore, but it involves investigating other people's lives

and of course when you enter a life from the outside it's all so mysterious and fascinating

podcasts have helped spawn this narrative form and i think it's bad trash. i think it's sloppy and lazy

do your discovery, then make your documentary. basically it's creators learning out loud, oh god, puh-lease

since i am not interested in this narrative trend i will be the kind throwing gas in its fire. any advertisement is good advertisement sure

[jenkins]

Edward Norton's adaptation of  Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn is kind of gross btw

it's not definitely kind of gross, in terms of there's like always another side to a situation, it's just basically gross that of course Edward Norton chose the detective with Tourette's, and he's going to play the part really well but he's faking it the whole time okay, i know you're great at acting but you might be missing a crucial point of our time

Jonathan Lethem is a literary figure but it just happened. he came at the right time is all. he liked the right things and helped mellow culture from an intellectual perspective. but i don't give a shit about that personally. i want your soul and fuck everything else. therefore The Fortress of Solitude is his best novel but it's only okay really

you guys get excited about so much bullshit it's hard with you sometimes, and Thom Yorke is doing music here, but i'm trying to help you realize this movie isn't part of the fight. it isn't real. it doesn't involve blood or soul. it's parlor tricks and fuck it

[Drenk]

I assume no Xixaxer is dying to see an Edward Norton flick, we'd be enlightened if we learned it had some kind of value.

(Its value being, of course, a pretty Thom Yorke single.)

[jenkins]

it is of course the reason thom yorke was chosen

[Alethia]

A good friend of mine worked on Motherless, so that's where my interest more or less begins and ends.

[WorldForgot]

Elin (Katarina Jakobson) and Tobias (Leif Edlund)  are a happily married couple who regularly vacation with their young daughter. The family is on a dreamy holiday when an innocuous case of food poisoning derails their plans and forever alters the course of their lives. Three years later, the once loving couple is on the road again to go camping, looking for one last chance to go back to the way things used to be. But what once was is lost, and our characters instead find themselves having to relive the same nightmarish events, as that day and the horrors it brings repeat themselves infinitely. Together, they must overcome their trauma, reconcile with their past and fight for their lives. Over, and over, and over again.

Is it odd that the youtube comments all phrase their praise the same way? "Absolutely loved it" except for the one person that detested it.

[jenkins]

its two and a half star review

Peter Parlow's "The Plagiarists" is a strange cat indeed. There's enough provocative material here to warrant a recommendation, yet none of it quite works in the way it was intended. The film is an intellectual exercise masquerading as an indie comedy, and though it didn't make me laugh once, it sure gave me plenty to contemplate. This is the sort of picture that is more fun to discuss afterward than it is to actively watch. I got more enjoyment from reading Parlow's exceptional interview in the production notes than I did from any given scene in the movie, some of which are so murky, they border on incoherent.

Lensed by editor/co-writer James N. Kienitz Wilkins on a Sony BVW-200 camera equipped with a Betacam SP videotape, the film deliberately utilizes outdated technology from the 1980s to mimic micro-budget productions routinely praised for their authenticity, from Dogme 95 classics to the diverse array of character studies notoriously labeled as "mumblecore." According to its official synopsis, Parlow's feature was conceived as "a playful critique of the mannerisms" that characterize indie filmmaking, allegedly resulting in "the casual perpetuation of stereotypes." It executes this premise by inviting us to guffaw at its own shallow caricatures of self-involved millennials, whose incessant whining makes the slim 76-minute running time feel at least twice as long. 

"You gonna roll your eyes," says Clip (Michael "Clip" Payne) to the unidentified youngster glued to an iPad upstairs in the seconds before he invites two strangers, would-be filmmaker Tyler (Eamon Monaghan) and aspiring novelist Anna (Lucy Kaminsky), into his home. Since the kid still has his headphones on, Clip's line seems to be directed more at us, the audience, in the first of numerous on-the-nose instances where the script co-authored by Wilkins and fellow visual artist Robin Schavoir breaks the fourth wall. No sooner has Clip made this promise than the young couple bursts through the door, sardonically dubbing themselves "the city people everyone complains about." With their car broken down, Tyler and Anna are only too happy to take Clip up on his offer to spend the night at his place, despite their racially fueled trepidation.

The couple's whiteness quickly emerges as one of their most glaring features, causing them to flinch at the mere sight of a black man later on in the film, simply because he reminds them of Clip, even with his back turned to them. As played by Payne, a longtime member of the Parliament-Funkadelic collective, Clip is endowed with a soothing voice that both draws us in and heightens our suspicion, playing into our expectations molded from endless contrived plots where lovers are lured into a trap by a kindly elder. The disconnect between Payne and his co-stars is apparent from the get-go, since he never shares the same frame with them. That's because his scenes were shot separately, thus preventing him from ever developing a natural chemistry with Monaghan and Kaminsky, who often appear as if they are talking to themselves.

Adding to the nagging strangeness of the proceedings is a monologue delivered by Clip toward the end of the first act to an awe-struck Anna. It is jarring not because its sublimely articulated recollection of youth is, as Anna judgmentally notes, "uncharacteristic" of Clip's language, but because Payne's affect is so flat that he appears to be reading off a teleprompter (and apparently was, according to Parlow). This choice, while audacious, strikes me as a miscalculation since it further renders what could've been an intriguing character into an enigmatic prop. We get little sense of what meaning these words held for him or why he bothered committing them to memory, since it's revealed months later, at the top of the second act, that Clip lifted them directly from Karl Ove Knausgård's My Struggle, Book 3: Boyhood. The inclusion of halo-like backlighting and hokey stock music found on Pond5.com, the non-diegetic nature of which breaks Dogme 95's vow of chastity, only adds to the surreal quality of Clip's plagiarized speechifying.

I couldn't help being reminded of a friend who became disillusioned upon learning that her high school mentor took credit for a pre-existing monologue, seeking unearned validation from her students by making it seem as if she had written it herself. This breach of trust can lead to a shattering sense of betrayal, especially when it is triggered by the deceptions of an adult role model. Yet in the case of Anna and Tyler, why are they so alarmed by a lie as harmless as Clip's? Is it the realization that they may never be capable of creating work as vivid and profound as what he chose to recite? Or is it a more insidious sense of indignation over a black man feigning ownership of a white author's thoughts? Since cultural appropriation reverberates through the entire history of American life, the couple's moral outrage boils down to sheer hypocrisy.

Suddenly, Clip is blamed for all the couple's subsequent misfortunes, prompted by Tyler's loss of an Evian contract after his busted car caused him to lose a day of filming on their latest commercial. Outraged that Clip fell short of embodying the angelic, oft-recycled trope referred to by Spike Lee as the Magical Negro, Tyler claims they've been cursed by a "black magician" who runs a "DIY daycare center executive produced by Morgan Freeman." This is one of many lines Tyler punctuates with a self-satisfied chuckle, while faced with deadening silence, not to mention consternation from their friend Alison (Emily C. Davis), who insists that she is only a casual acquaintance of Clip.

This assertion is somewhat refuted by the imagery that materializes during the film's epilogue, as we hear Alison in voice-over, reading a letter she has penned to Anna, encouraging her to complete her memoir. Though her words have been largely borrowed from a Guardian essay arguing that books are better than cinema, unlike Payne's stilted reading of the Knausgård text, Davis infuses the lines with such conviction that we barely realize in the moment just how inane they are, particularly when the revelations contained within the footage result in a sensory overload. As Wilkins noted during an interview with Filmmaker Magazine, "A very vapid assessment of film versus literature can take on depth if you're steamrolled by it."

"The Plagiarists" is a deeply frustrated film that is often frustrating to watch, yet it is most rewarding as a meditation on the obstacles modern day artists must contend with when living paycheck to paycheck. Among Parlow's chief targets is the delusion that a corporation can assist in realizing a director's dreams, as evidenced by the laughable Coca-Cola Regal Films shorts preceding the public screenings at Regal Cinemas, where student filmmakers are invited to "showcase their talent" with a 30-second ode to the joys of coughing up spare change for overpriced concessions. Concerns of a fiscal nature, rather than an ethical one, are what Parlow believes guide all aspects of the marketplace, and that includes the criminalization of plagiaristic acts, even those committed without monetary gain.

A great many questions are left unanswered here, and that is obviously by design, since Clip is used primarily as a scrim upon which Anna and Tyler can project their preconceptions. After all, what motivates the choices made by someone we don't know are not for us to define. It's also no accident that the film's title is a plural noun, not only since Alison appears to have inherited her friend's knack for copying and pasting, but because Parlow ultimately suggests that as members of the 21st century, we are all plagiarists feeding into an online pool of co-opted ideas. It's a powerful statement that is worth exploring. If only the film had characters on the level of its thesis. So aggravating are these Gen Y Bickersons that when Justin Chang's review of "You Were Never Really Here" began playing on their radio, it upstaged their banter to the point that I wished they'd simply shut up and savor the analysis.

[jenkins]

this breaks my heart in a different way

ugchk they didn't even screen it for critics. just, so sad

[jenkins]

https://twitter.com/THR/status/1184359846746972161

i mean some days in certain circumstances the climate crisis isn't happening fast enough

[jenkins]

Few films come out in any given year with creative choices as baffling as the ones made by Edward Norton's Motherless Brooklyn.

Ultimately, frustration and fatigue prevail over the film's intellectual acuity and political insight; neither is any true emotion ever forthcoming. This is odd and disappointing.

Norton earns praise for taking on the gargantuan task of bringing this story to the screen, and pulling quadruple duty as actor-director-writer-producer, but Motherless Brooklyn seems more like a blueprint of a great film that lacks the nuance it needs to be truly impactful.

The high-mindedness of the movie, its showy conviction that its heart is in the right place, dulls some of its political insights. And its grandiosity undermines the ragged pleasures of the genre.

Norton, who wrote and directed Motherless Brooklyn, does his best to imitate the genre's snappy dialogue and clever red herrings; but what starts out as a mystery as intelligent as it is intriguing winds up being over-plotted didactic.

This is a solid and enjoyable mystery flick, but through all the twists, turns, tics and twitches Motherless Brooklyn works hard to impart its message. And what ultimately comes out is somewhat hollow.

there are mildly positive reviews but i'm further shittalking this movie that's a clear b movie and idgaf about its heart. if it were being marketed as a b movie i would go see it, but it's not so fuck it