I only watch films in the best most modern theatres. I’m a huge film nerd. As you guys noted Nolan chooses to make his films incomprehensible. Remember Bain. It’s an artistic choice. It just happens to be a really terrible one. To be fair, I generally dislike Nolan’s modern films for a bunch of reasons so am less forgiving than I would be for other filmmakers.
As for the academy I’ll simple note Bohemian Rhapsody won best editing, a film that is objectively one of the worst edited films I’ve ever seen. The academy gets it wrong all the time.
Yeah, having listened to a number of reviews now, I’m gathering that more people feel like you than me regarding the thing I criticized, so I’m gathering that I may be in the minority on this one. Most of the movie has continued to digest nicely as I’ve had time to think about it, but I can’t say my reaction to that has really evolved. Much of it was that I just found it too jarring, and perhaps on rewatch I’ll feel differently since I’ll be prepared for it.
Lily Gladstone was tremendous. Really owned the screen at every opportunity. Should be a lock for an Oscar nomination and hopefully a contender to win.
Unfortunately I’m not really sure how to even make a case for these movies if the reaction is boredom. It took me multiple viewings of each to feel quite as strongly as I do, but if you’ve done that and your reaction is the same, I kind of think I’ve got nothing. (I fell in love with these movies in my early 20s, so I’m afraid that turning 40 wasn’t anything magical in the process on my end.)
I think at this point the GF suffers from the same fate as a lot of great films (or pieces of art, for that matter) from an earlier generation. The first move came out more than 50 (!) years ago. It was innovative at the time. It inspired literally generations of filmmakers since then to take the best parts of it and put it into their work. As a consequence, we have been consuming GF influenced work our whole lives. This has a weird reverse impact where a person who has been watching movies for the last 30 or 40 years, and then watches the GF, will experience the GF as seeming to be derivative of subsequent work!
I do think the GF has aged pretty well, but there’s no way to get back to the experience of having been a movie goer in the 70s or 80s where the GF still felt fresh and risky.
I love that it’s so incredible that it just made Steven Spielberg go, “Welp, I may need to find a new line of work, I have been permanently bested before I ever got going.”
In one of the bonus features of the DVD restoration of The Godfather, Spielberg revealed that he felt as if he could never contribute with anything that good: “I was pulverized by the story and by the effect it had on me, and I also felt that I should quit. There was no reason to continue directing because I would never achieve that level of confidence in the ability to tell a story such as the one I had just experienced.” As if this weren’t heartbreaking enough, he followed up, saying: “So, in a way, it shattered my confidence.”
This is so true of all film history. Ive had this argument with so many friends about classic films. I’ve had a few friends say Citizen Kane didn’t seem like much till you point out it invented most of what we call film language today.
Or watching all the crime films of the 90s then watching Pulp Fiction and wondering what all the hype is about.
I’ve enjoyed watching Citizen Kane, watched it a couple of times and found it to be a good experience, but it does feel like a movie that loses more of its watchability to age than many older films, even ones of its same era. Or at least that was my reaction on last viewing. It’s been a while. Obviously there’s no question of its historical impact.
That makes sense. Well, who knows. There’s more than one book or movie I just didn’t connect with until something shifted inside of me, but once it did, I loved it.
Fwiw I feel the same way about Jane Austen. Love the stories and character and how much of our literary landscape owes a debt to her, but her storytelling style bores me almost as much as Tolkien.
I’m with you on Tolkien, his style is really inaccessible to me. One of the GOAT world-builders though, and I love the LOTR movies. Austen I enjoy quite a bit once I get my brain transitioned into understanding what the hell she’s saying.
I still remember reading Emma, which features a plot point where Emma gets into a car with a man who “passionately begins making love to her.” My eyes just about bugged out of my head at this abrupt plot turn until I came to understand that “make love to her” meant telling her how much he loved her. This little language quirk of the time shows up in It’s a Wonderful Life too.
Right and I try to keep this in mind as well for younger audiences seeing something new that, for me, feels derivative and redundant.
On the Filmcast, for example, they reviewed The Creator and were both impressed but underwhelmed. I believe it was Devindra, however, who compares it to Blade Runner not being as good as we remember. He said that in the same way, a thirteen year old is likely to remember The Creator as an adult as one of the best movies they ever saw. Once you have that connection, it’s hard to break.
Hahaha that last part reminds me of the best scene in Downsizing.
Agree about Tolkien. Fantastic world building. I think that’s what I don’t like but what many epic fantasy readers adore about him. I want a straightforward storyteller, whereas he writes fantasy in the style of a historian. One of the early genre mashup innovators! I go the opposite direction and love history told in a cinematic style rather than the reverse.
The winners are voted on by the entire Academy, but the nominees are voted on by peers. That’s a big difference and again I think you’re putting your own taste into what you want want a movie to be vs. what a filmmaker’s vision is (there’s nothing wrong with that until you take something subjective to what you perceive to be objective).
The peers know when something is different and unique because 99% of movies basically get no award interest at all, even when they’re doing something really cool. It’s a thing where if you’re this passionate about it, you really should be in the industry trying to do it yourself to see how it works and how hard it is to get a vision on screen. That’s why I don’t subscribe to best/worst and only subscribe to my favorite/least favorite or I think or I like/dislike. There are different strokes for different folks and that’s totally ok. I found the editing of The Social Network to be remarkably irritating but it was nominated for an Oscar (might have won don’t feel like checking), which to me just proved it wasn’t to my taste (I like a more traditional style in editing and camera work). I never saw Bohemian Rhapsody so I can’t comment on the editing.
I also don’t believe Nolan tries to make his films incomprehensible even though he basically says he does. I think he does things he thinks are cool that are over the edge that he thinks work that his mixers probably usually don’t like but aren’t willing to fight him on. He is sometimes very wrong and often the difference between a well-directed movie and a poorly directed one are each choice made along the way.
An aside is I saw Black Mass and Sicario on the same day. I remember liking Black Mass and thinking, ‘that was a good movie, every choice the director made when he had one was the right one’ and then I went and saw Sicario and Black Mass felt like a below average to average movie. Villenueve is spetacular in a way that’s hard to describe and the director of Black Mass just wasn’t even on the same playing field as him. Villenueve may not always land but he puts himself in position to make what I feel are the best choices all the time. I’ll push back if I think what someone is doing is really wrong but you don’t get very far in the industry if you push back hard on a creative visionary like Nolan.
No matter what anyone thinks of Inception, I was blown away by that movie not because of what the movie was but because I felt like I was watching a person’s full mind vision on screen. It’s remarkably hard to do to get other people to fulfill your vision, but I think he did to almost 100 percent.
For the record, in my opinion all film criticism is subjective. Some of the technical aspects are objective but never whether I think it’s good or bad.
I haven’t any right to criticise books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
Letter from Mark Twain to Joseph Twichell, 13 September 1898
