Absolutely. I read that before my first viewing and felt so disappointed that it wasn’t more obtrusive. Now that I paid attention I feel embarrassed for missing so much.
Empire Records
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Black Swan
Between this and Amadeus, I have no idea what “dessert” means in this context.
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The theme is an interpolation and interrogation of obsession as seen through the eyes of a musician destined to destroy themselves.
Whiplash
Tàr
Farinelli
Amadeus
Not that it can’t have a happy ending, but the dessert for this dinner is more thought provoking than uplifting and needs a hint of l’appel du vide for a proper finish. The Piano, for example, does not feature a flawed enough protagonist to fit the theme, whereas Black Swan is not technically about a musician but is connected enough to the obsessive expression of music to play well in a marathon.
Babylon
6/10
Its well shot and individual scenes are great but it doesn’t cohere into a good thing. It wants to be bombastic and also about serious drama of the movie industry but it yo-yos between these two things and they undercut each other instead of augmenting each other
That’s a fair rating. A lot of the reviews/buzz made it sound like a 3 or a 4, which imo is ridiculous.
OK this post is blowing my mind and I am feeling like a philistine. I’m not going to finish this movie! This is like something they’d have made us watch in 8th grade history. I cannot believe Stanley Kubrick directed this. Pleas someone who didn’t like Barry Lyndon step up and make me feel less crazy.
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My mind is blown.
The director of Tàr is Todd Field, who played Nick Nightingale in Eyes Wide Shut.
At the urging of Stanley Kubrick and Tom Cruise, Field pursued his dream of directing his own features.
He would go on to make In the Bedroom, Little Children, and Tàr.
The story of a TV pilot as it goes through the network TV process of casting, production and finally airing.
This was as good as Get Shorty if you remove the mob characters. Biting, authentic, and funny without ever exaggerating the reality of the business.
It’s on FreeVee with ads or Starz.
Yea it was on the higher end of the bell curve. Some scenes were perfect, I’d say basically the first half showing how gonzo the silent movies where up to the “hitting the mark” scene showing the transition from that gonzo style to an increasingly professionalized industry and the intense stress that it created. The latter half fell off though with the underground freak show scenes being the worst where I understand the abstract plot point they’re wanting to do but really what are we doing here?
I feel like maybe trimming the movie down would have forced everything to tighten up. With the long running time it let the director have his cake and eat it too and in this case it didn’t work.
Watched BS High, the documentary on the fake high school Bishop Sycamore that gained infamy when it got demolished by IMG Academy in a football game on ESPN.
Man, I knew it was fake, but I didn’t know the extent of it all. And the founder/coach is a fucking psycho.
I’m glad they talked about how the “school” is a symptom of a bigger problem and just “whoa look how fucked up this shit is.” (though they could have gone into way more detail about the pervasive issues - it was really a doc focused on the founder/coach)
I was channel surfing and saw the BS/IMG game and thought it was a college team playing a high school team. We had a perennial powerhouse in the Seattle area that had a fake alternative school feeding them ringers. Buddah Baker was one of them.
I saw a review on it. Makes me really want to see it and the coach does seem insane. Freaking juco players playing on a team that sucks in high school.
Past Lives (2023)
This movie was made for me in some lab. It starts with a Leonard Cohen song then references Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
It’s quiet, insightful, longing, and revelatory. It makes earth shattering drama from everyday life and leaves you thinking about the paths you missed.
Just utter brilliance. As close to flawless as a film can get.
Grade A++
My favourite film of the year, by far.
It’s like the film version of Kahlil Ginran’s poem On Marriage which in part says,
Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
4 Likes
There’s not a lot on that, though they do discuss it briefly because it just adds to how much the founder is a con man. And the team was still terrible.
I did a double feature this weekend. Saturday was Gran Turismo at the local megaplex, and Sunday was Contempt at Film Forum.
Gran Turismo is certainly watchable, but it’s just another racing movie. Ford v. Ferrari and Rush are recent entries in that genre that are much better, so you should just watch one of those instead of you haven’t already.
Contempt is an odd one and won’t be for everybody. Its opening shot is one of the best in cinema. The stellar cast include almost all of Brigette Bardot, Jack Palance in a great comic role, and Fritz Lang (!) as himself. The plot is roughly about marital discord between a writer and his wife as the writer tries to rewrite a screenplay for an adaptation of the Odyssey that Palance’s character is producing and Lang is directing. The movie within a movie is pretty bonkers, and the top level movie seems to be in part an allegory about the relationships between an artist, his art, and the commercial system that enables the production of art.
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I loved it too, really awesome.
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No question that it’s a poor man’s Ford v Ferrari even though I enjoyed it. Once it loses the big screen and is just a fellow streaming option, there would be no reason for a person to pick it between the two. Still, it does pop nicely in Dolby Cinema right now.