For music, I’m a different case. I want an album or song to ‘sound’ the way I want to hear it inside how it was written and recorded. Sometimes it gets close, sometimes it’s way off. So now I create that for songs I like, to see how they’ll go and am often happy with the results. And it’s a satisfying creative exercise that keeps me sharp. What I’m more generally saying is that when you hear a part or a song and you want to hear something more or something less or something different inside that construct. That happens all the time and is usually how remixes begin.
The point was mainly that music, TV, and film share a lot of audience wishcasting for lack of a better word. The three are highly criticized art forms that are challenged as much for what they are as what they aren’t. The further something strays from ‘formula’, the more it will be positively and negatively criticized. It’s one thing to subvert audience expectations effectively, it’s another to baffle them or to leave them unanswered questions they felt should have been answered (audiences have gotten way too sophisticated to put up with that LOST kind of bull**** anymore). People like to know the director/writer’s point of view even if the writer/director might not want to share that because it lets us inside that person’s brain if only for a few hours at a time.
For movies, I think it’s more that people get really disappointed when a movie doesn’t live up to the expectations of the trailer or if the trailer tells the whole movie. What’s worse is when a trailer screws up a really good movie because it doesn’t know how to market it. Both Hell or High Water and Moonlight had trailers/marketing campaigns that didn’t get the job done. Sicario probably did, too. I remember when Warner had The Disaster Artist that their marketing department was so unable to come up with a marketing campaign that they sold what would eventually become an Oscar nominated film to avoid trying to promote it. That was wild. A lot of trailers these days are really not good. I don’t see a lot of movies in the theater these days, but am almost always massively underwhelmed by the trailers I see.
loved this one, and I agree with you that LG is great, also think that Stewart is too (the clearest memory I have of this movie is of the look on her face when she goes to meet LG in the parking lot at the end)
btw I think is one is more representative of the rest of Reichardt’s movies than First Cow, so if you like it I’m sure you’ll enjoy the rest of them too.
I think my favourite would be “Wendy&Lucy”, while “Night moves” is the only one which is imo outright bad at times (although it’s also part great). but if you like her overall approach whether you like a particular film better may just depend on the subject matter / whether you like the actors in it, so I’d just watch them all (which is what I did in between releases of Certain women and First cow)
Saw Civil War yesterday, gave my self some time to process and make it wasn’t a knee jerk reaction. I think I feel the same today - Alex Garland is a master of anxiety and ambience and he does things superficially that are worth the price of admission just for the mood music. But the story doesn’t work for me and overall the movie doesn’t amount to much.
When you choose to tell a story in the backdrop of the American landscape like this - set in the current day - with all of the American iconography and uniforms and hick jingoism etc., you are inviting the audience to bring along all of the baggage that comes with that. You have already made the decision to import political substance into the film. It’s literally a constant distraction if you never intend to address it.
What I really don’t like about this approach is that he wants to have his cake and eat it too. He either can’t or won’t explain a politically cohesive American civil war scenario but he wants to make an “important” film leveraging our political emotions. So to mask this lack of ambition we get a key hole/snapshot narrative with so-so character building no real stakes. Then it’s on us for constantly asking questions throughout because of our own political “biases” but there’s no meaningful indictment of the audience in this.
An American civil war movie with no deliberate political subtext like this is at best pointless and at worst a bit insidious in hand-waving legitimate political divisions for some return-to-civility world view. So I guess at the end of it I’m just left asking what was the point? If it’s just for the unease that accompanies the aesthetics then it’s just a cheap thrills movie. If it’s supposed to be some kind of banal warning then by ignoring political substance and focusing instead on crying about monuments and institutions crumbling then it rests on some pretty boring and superficial reasoning.
It’s basically Leave the World Behind with some additional directorial flourishes. It may as well have taken place in Belgium or been about a natural disaster since the civil war dynamics are irrelevant and actively detract from it.
Yeah, agree, I’d largely ignored Kristen Stewart for a good while because for a good while her primary work was in the Twilight franchise that I’ve never cared to give a chance to. And while I was able to offer a detached appreciation to her good performance in Stewart, that movie mostly bored me.
With Love Lies Bleeding being one of the better early releases of the 2024 film year and her being good in it, she’s got a bit more of a foothold with me now, and this definitely helped as well.
Re: this story with Gladstone, I felt like I had been dropped into a low-key horror movie as soon as Lily hit the road for Billings. Just this awful feeling of “oh no…” Despite rooting for her, it also occurred to me that the only thing that would be worse than it going badly would be it going well, just because it seemed like that would betray the story that I’d been watching. So I’m glad it went the direction it did, I really think it was a beautiful portrayal, but the cringe in watching the meeting in Billings play out was real.
The interesting thing is I’ve seen this exact same argument from some right wing reviews. That is sort of the point. Had he made the film you want see he would be getting lambasted for being partisan. It’s lose lose.
By purposely making it vague there is a way in for all sides.
Honestly I think it’s just as much, if not more, that the focus of the movie didn’t want to be about current events. It wanted to be a larger statement about how we’re not safer, we’re not better than these other wartorn regions.
Except you want the wrong side to complain about being made the bad guys, they ARE the bad guys. I’m fine with being in the party for “don’t overthrow the government when you lose the popular vote.” The topic seems too important to just make a “war is bad” movie and ignore that the reason for the war is 50 years of bad decisions by the people in power.
I guess I don’t accept the premise it’s his job as a movie writer or director to address that issue. He clearly didn’t want to on purpose. He didn’t want to address the current political climate.
He told the story he wanted to tell (most likely, it will come out eventually if he didn’t) and missed an opportunity to tell a story more likely to affect the current state of society. He doesn’t get to dodge questions about the partisanship of today’s current events because he didn’t make that movie though.
Isn’t there a school of thought that says every war movie is basically just war porn for society? That it’s basically impossible to make an anti-war movie?
The director is basically trolling America. I’m sorry, but he makes a movie about an American Civil War as America is currently drawing live to an actual insurrection, and then scolds everyone for bringing context into the theater with them.
Excellent movie. Back when Denzel won the Oscar for this, I had only caught part of it and it hadn’t grabbed me at all, so I was mad that he got the award over Russell Crowe’s tremendous performance in A Beautiful Mind. Took a while for me to get a proper watch of it, and obviously that first half-assed attempt at viewing it didn’t remotely do it justice. It’s awesome.
And as for Denzel winning, I get it. I still tend to think I’d go Crowe’s performance that year on the merits, but Denzel being widely beloved and Crowe having seemingly earned a reputation as an unlikable prick is obviously the sort of thing that can tip the scales. And unlike my half-baked take back in the moment, it’s definitely an Oscar-worthy performance. And Ethan Hawke is ridiculously good in it too. Many actors would get swallowed up and overpowered by the Denzel performance and look awfully weak by comparison, but Hawke holds his own.
I’ll tell you a little story. I worked on the commentary for that movie in 2001 and saw it a few weeks after it came out (at work not in a theater). I remember going to the guy who recorded the commentaries after watching it the first time and saying, ‘it will probably never happen because of the kind of movie it is, but Denzel should win the Oscar for this’ (I wasn’t even expecting him to get nominated despite deserving it). His performance was absolutely pitch perfect in the movie and he was scary af (the best way to watch his performance is as the devil as described in the Bible). Antoine Fuqua said he stayed in character on the set the entire time, which must have been a ‘joy’ to work with.
When the nominations came out, I was very happy that he got the nom. I almost never watch the Oscars because I can’t stand award shows, but I followed along on IMDb and him winning was probably the happiest I had ever been at a win up to that point. The only similar moment was hating the Academy for La La Land winning over Moonlight and then finding out Moonlight really did win. Hate to elation in 10 seconds was amazing.
The other thing I remember saying was that I had to see the movie with an audience, because of how good Denzel was and how always likable he was in movies in nearly every performance prior to that one. This was not long after 9/11, maybe late October or early November, and it was something. I’ve never sat in a movie theater with an audience that was that stunned at a movie. Normally, when the credits roll, some people leave, some people stay, whatever. In this one, the entire theater was just deflated. No one moved and the air was heavy. They just couldn’t believe Denzel was a bad guy. The one scene obviously began to move the needle, but by the end, the audience really was in shock that it wasn’t just a ‘game’. I’m sure what went through a lot of heads was first we lost the towers and now we lost Denzel…dam. Really awesome experience.
A final anecdote was that legal wanted to cut something from the commentary that would have likely got Fuqua in trouble with the massive amount of local support he had making the movie in an area that had never been previously filmed in. I don’t tend to fight a lot of legal notes (I occasionally do), but I made the case that the thing they wanted to cut should stay and why. Legal agreed, despite it clearly scaring them, and let it stay. I always like when those victories happen.
If you haven’t seen it, you should check out the Showtime show The Good Lord Bird. His peformance in that show is unreal. Trailers really sold him short on his performance and made him look like a ham sandwich. But when you see it in context, it is a holy s*** performance that sits inside an unbelievable musical scale. Overall, it’s a hilarious show, too. I was very disappointed Hawke didn’t even get nominated for his role, which more likely was because no one had seen it.
(which is what I did in between releases of Certain women and First cow)