it's a bit so simple it can be overwhelming. right. life, right?
right. a story spun into a detective tale seen through the prism of the 60s, a time during which humans were indeed a disparate collection of people on a mission to solve the case, and this is 1970 and post-manson so it's all quite questionable
the case is life, doc is asked to solve it, except what exactly the case means seems like an amorphous threat that consistently swells and becomes reevaluated owing to outside sources, and the figurehead of the crime is a company that might not even exist
i do think it's simple overall, but when looked upon by microscopes and fandom it looks too massive. has not pta grandslammed, by making a movie about larry doc in which every audience member across the board sounds like doc themselves, when they describe the movie? when a discussion begins about how pta has begun to externalize the characters into their narratives, and the discussion is joined by memories of what a detective case tends to be, and it tends to be a case that subterraneously explores the darkness of humans, doesn’t the answer come to itself: this is a movie in which the essential philosophy of a detective story has been externalized
pta's a sonofabitch because i just think it's a bit of a personal problem for a person to say he makes movies wrong. this is a hard movie, innit, isn't that what people say? so fuck pta for the same reason as always, for making the hard look easy. its lyrics sang to me today, here on christmas eve, when i saw it in the dome with about twenty other people. clear today from my memory of the book, my memory of having seen the movie, and in a theater so quiet and unpeopled that i felt like there was nothing between me and the movie at all
i haven't consumed marketing materials nearly as much as others here but, i tell ya, i really think they're trying their best to explain the movie through marketing. i do remember the first screencap there was, and i thought of it tonight while watching the movie:
the proof is in the pudding. doc looking at bigfoot like that, there you go, that's the cosmic energy of the movie. that explains: this is a movie about the forces of personalities colliding against each other, with separate and/or similar motives and all that. i also think pta plucked a great line from the first chapter for the first scene of the movie "Back when, she could go weeks without anything more complicated than a pout. Now she was laying some heavy combination of face ingredients on him that he couldn't read at all."
the emotional tempo was transparent to me today. i regret not saying immediately that joaquin phoenix delivers an impressive performance. i think he's a got a bit of a constant struggle in him, and a bit of a constant fight, and that is of course what doc needed. not more of either and plenty of both. i wouldn't say there's a bad performance anywhere in the movie. plus, the music, since today i was following the emotions, the music is an impressive guide to the emotions of the movie, absolutely
I've got a question for the majorspoiler squad. Is there a scene in this akin to the frogs in Maggie, the ending to twbb, the processing scene in The Master? I don't mean in terms of content but similar in a "holy fuck" woah nowthatssomething" kinda way.
said it before and i'll say it again: the sex scene with shasta. i believe that's the same kinda gift of a scene, because i think it pulls back from the story, and pushes in on the two central characters, and it's a bit like they meet in an empty field and the wind blows on them, kinda thing. the music, the pace of the scene, its intro, its outro. you could pluck out that one scene and have a short with all the necessary and digestible components of a human relationship
