The Film Thread

[Mark Albrighton]

38 minutes ago, Stevo985 said:

Yeah...

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It wasn't so much the tone of the ending I didn't like. I like darker endings to stuff so the fact it wasn't a happy ending wasn't the problem.
My issue was that it was so abrupt. It's a spectacular sequence but it's done almost like an epilogue. It felt like 2 acts are done full length and then the final act is just tagged on at the end

 

Continuing our secret conversation…

Spoiler

I’m down for a dark ending. But I think it has to be earned and it has to be well executed. It’s feels a bit mean spirited to me (with regards to Audrey and Seymour). The OTT ending is also a hell of a lot bigger than the rest of the film, which mostly was a few small sets with a handful of characters. It doesn’t really feel in keeping with the rest.

I’ve just rewatched the original version on YouTube. It goes on far too long. It needs to be, kinda, 3 minutes at most. The final song (“Don’t feed the plants”) is completely lost among what we’re watching, you can’t really hear it may as well not be there.

Maybe the idea was let’s do a homage/parody of the 50’s horror films and just go crazy with it. Admittedly though, as I say I’m so familiar with the happy ending I can’t fairly judge this alternative version.

As an aside, one of the producers must have been fond of their pet dog and insisted that it be in the film because there are two quick shots of the same dog running away from the chaos. All by itself, the same dog, for no apparent reason we’re treated to two drop shots of it scampering away.

 

[Stevo985]

1 hour ago, Mark Albrighton said:

Continuing our secret conversation…

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I’m down for a dark ending. But I think it has to be earned and it has to be well executed. It’s feels a bit mean spirited to me (with regards to Audrey and Seymour). The OTT ending is also a hell of a lot bigger than the rest of the film, which mostly was a few small sets with a handful of characters. It doesn’t really feel in keeping with the rest.

I’ve just rewatched the original version on YouTube. It goes on far too long. It needs to be, kinda, 3 minutes at most. The final song (“Don’t feed the plants”) is completely lost among what we’re watching, you can’t really hear it may as well not be there.

Maybe the idea was let’s do a homage/parody of the 50’s horror films and just go crazy with it. Admittedly though, as I say I’m so familiar with the happy ending I can’t fairly judge this alternative version.

As an aside, one of the producers must have been fond of their pet dog and insisted that it be in the film because there are two quick shots of the same dog running away from the chaos. All by itself, the same dog, for no apparent reason we’re treated to two drop shots of it scampering away.

 

No I don't think you're unfairly judging it. I'd say that lines up with how I feel. it's very abrupt and out of kilter with the rest of the movie. You can see how the rest of the movie is derived from a stage show, and then suddenly you have this massive climax out of nowhere.

I get the ending, I don't think the actual plot point is bad. It's just the way it's executed.

[BOF]

On 22/01/2023 at 00:46, Designer1 said:

It's OK but not a patch on the Swedish original from a few years ago.

The trailer makes it look like a cynical Gran Torino remake for the summer audience.

[Designer1]

This is the far superior original...

[Rds1983]

1 hour ago, Stevo985 said:

You can see how the rest of the movie is derived from a stage show, and then suddenly you have this massive climax out of nowhere.

 

[NoelVilla]

18 minutes ago, Designer1 said:

This is the far superior original...

I haven't watched this yet cause I fear it will not capture the mood of the book in the right way. But I will do it soon now.

But Rolf Lassgård is way more like I picture Ove in the book than Tom Hanks.

[Rds1983]

Watched The Northman this evening and really struggled to get into it. Not entirely sure why though as feels like there is a really good film in there somewhere but something felt off.

Edited January 24, 2023 by Rds1983

[Risso]

The Banshees of Inisherin - absolutely brilliant, loved every second.

Bank of Dave, sub-Richard Curtis utter shite.

[PieFacE]

Watched Prisoners for about the 4th time. Think it's one of my favourite films ever. Watching it now as a parent kinda brought a whole new dimension to the film for me as I kept thinking what would I do in the position of Hugh Jackmans character. 

Edited January 25, 2023 by PieFacE

[sheepyvillian]

I'm rewatching Oliver Stone's JFK. Even if you find that whole conspiracy thing hard to swallow, it's still a great movie, imo. Just the scope of it is breathtaking. Also it has some great performances, with wonderful cameos from Jack Lemmon, Kevin Bacon and Donald Sutherland. I believe Tommy Lee Jones should have got the oscar for his portrayal of Clay Shaw.

Also an interesting fact, the real Jim Garrison was also in the movie,  he played, ironically, Earl Warren, the head of the commission that investigated the assassination. 

[Spoony]

Watching The Untouchables. How is this film highly rated?? Even “for its time”’ it’s utter shite. Must have been an awful year for awards for Connery to have won an Oscar. It’s borderline funny. 

[BOF]

I read this article about Banshees of Inisherin and it hits on exactly what I was referring to in my post here in a much more eloquent way than I do. It's a bit of a long read, but it's such a complex explanation required for why the film will just sit differently with an Irish audience than it will with those less familiar with what he's calling 'Irishness', which necessitates the reporter going into a bit of history for context. I'm glad it wasn't just me.

Quote

The Banshees of Inisherin and the put-on Irishness of Martin McDonagh.

By Mark O’Connell

Jan 26, 20231:00 PM
 

The very first thing we see, in the opening seconds of The Banshees of Inisherin, is clouds. We don’t know that it’s clouds we’re looking at until the aerial shot makes its descent, and the vapor begins to lift, like a rising theater curtain, to reveal a strange and gorgeous landscape. We’ve seen it a thousand times, and it’s like nothing we’ve ever beheld: a bizarre terrain, almost luminously green and latticed by a crazed network of low walls enclosing nonsensically tiny fields. The image brings a number of associations to mind—the paintings of Paul Henry, the imagined west of Ireland of J.M. Synge’s plays, a thousand ads for Irish tourism—and is at once beautiful, unique, and irredeemably cliché. It advises the audience to prepare itself for levels of Irishness both unprecedented and intimately familiar. Hold on to your flat caps, it says: Here comes Ireland.

Over the next two hours, Martin McDonagh’s film—nominated this week for nine Oscars, including Best Picture—delivers exactly that. Landscapes of ravishing desolation. Donkeys, and occasionally other livestock, inside cottages. People wearing thick woolen clothes that look like they would be horribly scratchy. Auld fellas drinking loads of pints. Stoic and long-suffering women. People talking in poetically inverted syntax, and committing acts of unfathomable savagery. You know: Ireland. Or rather, “Ireland,” because—as McDonagh knows as well as anyone—this version of Irishness has always had an uneasy relationship with the actual country and the people who live in it.

Those people, American viewers might be surprised to learn, do not include the writer and director of the film himself. McDonagh was born and raised in London. His parents were both from the west of Ireland, and he spent frequent summer months there as a child; when he was in his early 20s, his parents returned to live in Galway while he stayed behind in London to pursue a writing career. His early plays, which went on to massive international success, were all set in the rural west of Ireland. Those plays drew far more deeply on the Irish literary tradition than on the complexities of the contemporary country itself, and their dialogue was characterized by an intense, at times luridly lyrical Hiberno-English. Those plays are clearly the work of an “Irish writer,” but it’s an Irishness formed as much by distance as intimacy. It’s as though they’re reacting against a somewhat abstract idea of the place, informed by an emigrant’s reverence and romanticism. They are absurdist, and often shockingly violent, and it isn’t always clear whether McDonagh is subverting ancient clichés about Ireland and the Irish—misty poeticism, rural backwardness, prodigious boozing, etc.—or merely employing them in his own distinct way. The Banshees of Inisherin, which is his first feature film to be set in Ireland, was initially begun in the late 1990s as a work for the stage, and its version of Ireland treats the real country with the same theatrical abstraction as those early plays.

Early in Banshees, Pádraic—the guileless farmer played by Colin Farrell—shaves while gazing at himself in a cracked mirror. I couldn’t decide whether this was a deliberate reference or just a bit of coincidental set dressing, but it was hard not to think of Stephen Dedalus’ famous remark, in the opening pages of Ulysses, about a similarly damaged mirror: “It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant.” The line is among the most resonant in the novel, and therefore in all of Irish literature, because it encapsulates Stephen’s (and Joyce’s) desire to break free of colonialism’s disfiguring influence on representations of Ireland and Irishness. It alludes, in particular, to the sentimental renderings of rugged Irish peasant life that were at the time among the predominant modes of Irish representation in literature and art: the donkeys, the landscape, the stoic women. Joyce is merciless in pillorying this sort of stuff throughout Ulysses, and other Irish writers have been just as derisive; Flann O’Brien, for instance, took it to ingeniously absurd extremes in The Poor Mouth, his ruthless satire of the romanticization of rural poverty.

One of the most obvious targets of Stephen’s “cracked mirror” quip was the Abbey Theatre, an institution set up as part of the Irish Literary Revival movement by a cohort of mostly Anglo-Irish cultural grandees, and which promoted a bleakly idealized image of Irish peasant life. W.B. Yeats and J.M. Synge, both Anglo-Irish—Irish, that is, but members of a Protestant ruling class descended from the original English colonial settlers—were among the most prominent of the Revival’s writers, and both contributed to this focus on rural poverty as the true soul of Irishness. As well-intentioned as the Abbey’s mission might have been as a contribution to Irish cultural self-consciousness, and as aesthetically powerful as the plays often were, this stuff unwittingly reasserted England’s colonial hegemony by staging Ireland as an unsophisticated peasant culture. The defiant cosmopolitanism of Joyce’s novel—with its urban setting, its relentless ridicule of narrow nationalism, and the son of a Hungarian Jew at its center—was, among other things, a reaction against such restrictive conceptions of Irishness.

One of the ironies of McDonagh’s career is that his early work as a playwright, deeply informed as it was by the poetry and violence of Synge’s Abbey plays in particular, was rejected by the Abbey when he submitted it. Those plays—The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Lonesome West, and The Cripple of Inishmaan—were eventually produced by the Galway-based Druid Theatre, and went on to become career-launching stage sensations. I’d wager that at this point the Abbey would be happy to have him, but as recently as last year, McDonagh insisted in an interview that, because of that early objection, he would never work with them. (I’ve always considered pettiness to be a minor hallmark of a serious artist, and in at least this sense, McDonagh qualifies.)

Much more in the link ...

 

[The Fun Factory]

Watched Bablyon the other day. Seemed to be a mix of the Great Gasby (Baz Lurhmann version), The Artist, and SIngin' in the Rain. Not as good as any of the unfortunately, it was a bit of a mess. Far too long.

[messi11]

On 25/01/2023 at 12:51, PieFacE said:

Watched Prisoners for about the 4th time. Think it's one of my favourite films ever. Watching it now as a parent kinda brought a whole new dimension to the film for me as I kept thinking what would I do in the position of Hugh Jackmans character. 

I'm a big fan of the director Denis Villeneuve
Have you ever watched Incendies? I think that's his masterpiece. 

[messi11]

Recently watched The Menu which was just an average Jordan Peele wannabe movie. 5/10

[hogso]

3 hours ago, messi11 said:

I'm a big fan of the director Denis Villeneuve
Have you ever watched Incendies? I think that's his masterpiece. 

Is he actually making Rendezvous with Rama, or not? Information online I've read is rather non committal, and old. 

[messi11]

6 minutes ago, hogso said:

Is he actually making Rendezvous with Rama, or not? Information online I've read is rather non committal, and old. 

Probably got to a different director. I know he's busy with Dune.

[Chindie]

6 hours ago, BOF said:

I read this article about Banshees of Inisherin and it hits on exactly what I was referring to in my post here in a much more eloquent way than I do. It's a bit of a long read, but it's such a complex explanation required for why the film will just sit differently with an Irish audience than it will with those less familiar with what he's calling 'Irishness', which necessitates the reporter going into a bit of history for context. I'm glad it wasn't just me.

 

Good read.

Obviouslly I can''t speak from an Irish perspective, but I can 'get' the idea behind the article, that it's basically using a DisneyLand vision of Ireland and the Irish people that isn't really anything other than a stereotyped wallpaper for the story that he leans on to colour the work. I haven't watched Banshees of Inisherin yet, but will, and of McDonagh's other stuff he does have a crutch of colouring his work with overblown stereotyped character to fill out and give the thing tone and, well, character. It works for some things better than others - as the article says In Bruges does it and it works ok there (probably because the 'Irishness' of it isn't the point - Farrell and Gleeson just so happen to be Irish characters who slightly amped up from 'real', but thats not what the film is about), which is less the case with Banshees as the entire setting implies it's a pointedly Irish tale (although I believe that it's a story that calls back to McDonagh's crutch and you could make the same story with the same plot and some theme anywhere)... I can understand that having the entire world be given this lauded vision of your home and your people that is actually a heightened stereotype that has been ridiculed by native writers for a century would rub you the wrong way.

I do wonder if it would be possible for McDonagh, right now, to write a film set in Somalia, with local actors, and achieve the same thing he does with his very 'Oirish' tone.

[Chindie]

Watched Bringing Out the Dead for the first time in a few years tonight. Scorsese's forgotten film in many ways, it's criminally under regarded imo. Nic Cage is fantastic in it, has a great soundtrack, super compelling story and themes, Scorsese's take on that slightly grimy late 90s neo noir-y genre. Watch it.

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

On 20/01/2023 at 19:16, fightoffyour said:

Is Glass Onion a sequel of Knives Out? Should I watch the latter first ?

I found both of them a waste of time. 2/10 for both.