I don’t think you are missing the point, just that you don’t find it persuasive. And that is just the give and take of art. We can’t control everyone’s interpretations or experience.
Fwiw, Chazelle was surprised when some people took the ending as a triumph instead of tragedy.
Chazelle: It motivated me to be a good drummer, so it worked for me, but it also posed the question of what would happen if you were to push that kind of behavior even further. What would you do if you had a teacher who was a true objective monster, not just someone who scares you personally or is tough on you and maybe borderline cruel? At what point do the ends not justify the means?
Interviewer: You ultimately leave it up to the audience to decide whether Andrew’s transformation is a triumph or a tragedy.
Chazelle: I like that you said that because that was certainly the hope. Sometimes I get worried that—no, worried is the wrong word, because if people enjoy the ending, then that’s great. But I had always thought, when writing the film, that the ending had always veered a little more on tragic than triumphant. In terms of a lot of responses to the movie, at least from what I’ve seen, the ending seems to be interpreted as a little more triumphant than tragic. Again, that’s not something that I’m upset about. If anything, it makes the movie more enjoyable for people, but it has been a really interesting thing to observe. I had always intended it to be a pretty dark ending.
Heck yeah. Pre code movies rule, don’t think I’ve ever been disappointed watching one. Recently watched Murders in the Zoo. For a movie that’s 90 years old, it slaps. It looks great.
My feeling is that Berry Allen is supposed to be autistic, which is where the abrasive goofball comes from, but then his alternative self then really does seem, like, extremely low on the cognitive scale, in like an uncomfortable way.
I find Whiplash not realistic, but also a great movie. Sadly though this puts me in the ‘it’s glorifying assholes’ camp because it’s one thing to be ambiguous when you’re hewing close to real life, it’s another to have an unrealistic movie where the assholes are the good ones who ‘get it’.
A solid B+ horror movie. Typical second generation immigrant ashamed of her native culture and trying to fit in finds out that native culture’s boogeyman is real. Not especially innovative but also doesn’t do anything terrible like have silly plot points or terrible CGI, I’m looking at you Cobweb. Something you’d pop in on a Friday night in October and enjoy it.
The most famous documentary of the last ~decade is how the best American athlete of the last 30 years was the biggest asshole to everyone but its exactly why he and those around him were successful.
The Last Dance explicitly states this as a truth from Jordan and all of his teammates.
Ive always considered both of the leads to be pretty bad people, or at least severely flawed. Ive heard people say the ending is triumphant, but Ive always seen it to be kind of a real downer ending. They have both succumbed completely to their obsession at the end. Teller’s character likely kills himself at some point after the movie ends, and Simmons character will ultimately talk himself into thinking Teller wasn’t really “the one” and will have to keep looking and obsessing. In the singular moment they may be happy, but both are broken people woth different obsessions that will ultimately ruin them. The movie to me has always been a cautionary tale about the horrors of obsession for both men, not something anyone should want to emulate.
Jordan is the GOAT and yet comes off as an incredibly unhappy and dislikeable person. He seems depressed and addicted to gambling. Like Teller, we see the glory his obsession brings, but we also see the dark side. Both mobies can be seen as triumphant, but they can also both be looked at as movies that ask “but at what cost?”
I think the scenes with Teller’s girlfriend in Whiplash are super important and often overlooked when people say how the movie has a happy ending.
In the quote in the @RiskyFlush post above, the writer says “But I had always thought, when writing the film, that the ending had always veered a little more on tragic than triumphant. In terms of a lot of responses to the movie, at least from what I’ve seen, the ending seems to be interpreted as a little more triumphant than tragic.”
I find this a little disingenuous. Really? You’re surprised that when the movie ends on a triumphant scene (musically speaking) that people feel the ending was more triumphant than tragic?
It would be like the Band of Brothers producers being surprised that people found the show to be, at least partially, glorifying war. “But we showed all the death and gore and the pointlessness!” Yeah, but you focused on the bond that developed between the men, and named the whole thing after an inspirational speech from Shakespeare, and focused on the “good war” where we saved the world.
p.s. I like Band of Brothers so please don’t pile on me
I felt like the latest All’s Quiet On the Western Front didn’t glorify war at all. Of course it’s hard to glorify WW1, but in that one no one’s heroic, war just happens, people die randomly, and any good parts happen away from the battles in scenes that are more reminiscent of domestic life than military life pointedly showing that their lives would have been 100% better if the war never happened, and then at the end the movie pretty much mocks the whole concept by glibly describing that the line only moved a couple of miles.
Normally in movies about a bad war there’s some element of ‘the war might not have been good, but the men bonded together in shared sacrifice’. That didn’t have any of that.
That’s where I tried to differentiate. In real life it may so happen that a complete asshole who has a terrible personal life may do great things and you can make a documentary about doing those things, while trying to be even handed about what was lost, and still come out seemingly like you’re glorifying it because hey it actually just so happened that they were, you know, good at what they do.
In a fictional movie reality doesn’t need to intrude on the story. I’d be clear too I’m only making an ascetic judgement on the movie, not a moral one. I wouldn’t tell anyone not to watch it because it’s glorifying assholes. I’d even recommend it because I think it’s a good movie. I think though if you were to ask me which side it comes down on I’d say it comes down on the ‘it takes a special genius to do great things and they have to make sacrifices that the normal person is afraid to make’ side of things.
Sure. I just do not enjoy questioning the director’s motives or intentions based on whether I found their story convincing. I accept his sincerity and that you did not find it persuasive.
We have very different definitions of glorifying war. Any movie that shows helicopters flying in formation with a classic rock song underneath is glorifying war.
The plot is simple enough. A cowboy and expert gunslinger named Silva (Pedro Pascal) rides across the desert to meet a cowboy-turned-sheriff named Jake (Ethan Hawke) after decades of estrangement. However, Silva has ulterior motives beyond rekindling the long-extinguished flame of a desirous relationship. Silva’s son may have committed a murder and he’s not above seducing his old lover to save his son.
Perhaps the reticence of Western heroes—who need to stick to whatever rules they come up with—clashes with Almodóvar’s sense of story. His characters never live by rules and they are more eccentric, more emotionally extreme in the best sense than the trope of the mythic gunslinger. That dichotomy does not work in favor of a 31-minute movie.
Yeah its definitely a thing that war is so cinegenic that it’s hard to make it seem unappealing.
Like the latest Avatar, supposed to be a pro-Nature anti-War film, where all the battle scenes are (imo) 100x more entertaining than all those spent just exploring the scenery.
A movie that deals with this nicely is Starship troopers : since what you’re showing is going to be undistinguishable from fascist propaganda anyway, might as well embrace it and make it an overly enthusiastic satire.