Movies Talk

I totally agree with you that its aping Fellini, Satyricon of course, probably Roma and Voice of the Moon too? I guess from my perspective, all of these things were interesting to me? It has this kind of Gallo-esque politics to it, where he is trying to articulate vaguely left wing beliefs via Ayn Rand, which is just politically nonsense. We know how he feels politically after all, unless somehow this isn’t the same man that made Godfather 2. Same at how Gallo tries to make conservative films that just end up feeling like he should read Marx, maybe not the best comparison but he’s front of mind right now. Felt like he knew he was old and was in his head saying he has to make his late period gonzo Dreams or whatever.

What you describe as the kind of unreal performances, fair, but that’s what my group enjoyed, that everyone is performing first and foremost. I think performance and edit were the two highlights for me personally.

All of this to say, it’s fair not to like it, and don’t wanna convice you to! I don’t think it measures to the above late career stuff (Roma and Satyricon notwithstanding). But I think I arrived at many of the same comparisons as you did and liked it for it, alongside maybe Synecdoche New York which is kinda cool. My buddies and I left it feeling more like we saw Face/Off than that we saw Eyes Wide Shut (my personal favorite late period swing).

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Not to double post but re: the substance

Did coralie fargeat play Inside?

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Time for one last look at how the Big Apple can be rotten to the core with some especially deep cuts, films that are NOT for the feint at heart yet also truly illustrates what an intellectual/emotional/physical/spiritual rollercoaster ride living in NYC can often be (tho more like a subway ride amirite)…

Next was legit lost media until Vinegar Syndrome uncovered & completed the film themselves, which includes an all-star cast of martial arts luminaries…

Third up is the perfect illustration of how lonesome in can be the star of a one man show that is life in a city of 8 million as your backdrop…

Last but not least is yet another thing I’ve been wanting to show forever, the “meta soap opera” that basically screams “THIS is New York City”…

The stream will again be via the alt account, starting around 8PM-ish EST…

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stroking a what??

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Riefenstahl could be a Bond villain and people would say, isn’t she a little much?

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Let’s not implicate any corvids in that whole deal, not even Huginn and Muninn!!

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I like some of Coppola’s works but he’s always come off as a guy who had a ton of smoke blown up his ass at too young of an age fueling a massive ego who checked out to pursue a life of smoking weed and stewing in a vineyard making overpriced mediocre wine. Interested to see how much of that comes through in Megalolpolis.

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A lot!

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Thanks for the review of Undefeated! Definitely helps me to know there’s not a huge number of these scenes (as is sort of implied by the marketing copy)

Also, I kind of want to see this movie everyone kind of hates or really hates or kind of likes, but not enough to pay for it. but something tells me watching it at home I’d just stop. hmm. it sounds super rayndian to me.

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if you’re gonna do it, do it in the theater, but i would say it’s far from essential

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There’s absolutely no chance I would’ve finished it if I’d started it at home ha. I would’ve walked out of the theater if I hadn’t been someone else’s ride

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The Substance is absolutely worth seeing in the cinema for anyone who can. Sitting in the middle of a crowd of people, oscilating wildly between groans of disgust to laughing out loud, it is quite an experience. Explicitly horny, implicitly feminist, taking a swing at beauty standards and capitalism.

If you are squeemish at anything gory or gross, give it a hard pass.

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There’s a new version of The Count of Monte-Cristo in theaters. I saw it while staying in Marseille for a few days—didn’t think I would have any other opportunity to see this story in the city where it begins. Before going to the movie I looked up a map and realized I’d been to several places in the first chapters of the book—very cool! But I regret to report there is almost none of the city in the film, even less of Paris, and none of Rome nor anyplace else. Just one of several ways in which the adaptation tries to extricate the story from the particular time, place, and social/class context in which it’s set.

The movie is set in roughly six locations: the count’s house in Auteuil (outside Paris), Fernand’s wealthy family(???)'s estate outside Marseille, Fernand’s estate outside Paris, the cave on Montecristo, the inside of Villefort’s office, and 2 square meters on the pier in Marseille. I can recall the images I imagined of not just the inside of apartments, but the streets, the catacombs, the Colosseum! etc. where particular scenes in the novel take place, and I’m of course not disappointed the movie couldn’t read my mind, but more that it didn’t even make the attempt. Reconstructing all these places to period accuracy with CGI would have been difficult, or ugly, or both, that’s reason enough to have avoided it most of the time, but there could have been a little more scene-setting. So much of the movie is in closeup that it hardly matters where any of the action takes place, and when you can see the location it’s in the woods like 40% of the time. When Dantès reaches Montecristo—which would have been easier to film had they adhered to the cave in the book—it’s this silly and very conspicuous stairway leading to a very conspicuous Knights Templar statue which opens a mechanical door to an Indiana Jones cave (set to incredibly syrupy music). I guess noticing the absence or alteration of these places made me understand their importance. I miss Carnival :(

Broadly speaking, there are two common variations of the book-to-screen adaptation:

  1. targets theme and/or character, and develops them in its own direction i.e. differently from the book
  2. recounts as much of the plot as possible

Both abridge or otherwise alter the story such as it exists in the form of a novel; you can’t include everything especially when it’s something this dense in detail. It’s interesting to consider no one has really done a proper screen adaptation because the novel is not formally unusual, it’s a very straightforward story, but turning it into a less-than-three-hour film means it has to be changed. In any case this new version of Monte-Cristo appears at times to be the first kind of adaptation, but turns out to be—and demonstrates the various failures of—the second.

Dantès glares gloomily at his masks and his mirrors while practicing the lines he later speaks to his old enemies. Scenes of Haydée and André(a)—who is now the count’s protégé—meeting the count’s targets are doubled and intercut with scenes of their rehearsal. The problem is these are mostly fodder for montage, the motif isn’t really interrogated. It’s just another step along the path toward REVENGE. I like that this adaptation shows Dantès assuming his aliases—there’s an extended scene where Pierre Niney affects an English accent while speaking French which is fun—but again it doesn’t really mean anything, it’s just cute. They decided it looked cool when showing Dantès’s fractured reflection in all the mirrors at his dressing table and cut every half second to a different angle so none of the images can even really speak for themselves.

The abbé Faria is of course present, and he teaches Dantès everything he knows and motivates him to escape from prison as usual, but he doesn’t actually say anything specific. It’s just “look sonny boy, philosophy and math are weapons too! ;)” And that’s the movie’s problem in microcosm: it tells the outline of the story while skipping what is meaningful about it. Dantès risks losing himself to his thirst for vengeance, yes, and in the novel you see that there is a himself to lose when he acts with love and tenderness toward Morrel and his family. In the movie he is basically a ghost when he comes back from prison. It’s just thin, doesn’t make me want to root for him or anyone else.

misc. note: I realized when visiting Marseille that the Château d’If is extremely near the shore of the city, and so one change I didn’t really mind was after escaping prison Dantès swims back to the mainland to look for Mercédès (in the woods where she and everyone else live).

misc. note 2: Eugénie Danglars is not a very substantial character in the book, and is less of one in this movie. Shout-out to the anime adaptation for developing her into an interesting character.

After all that complaining I’m almost surprised to say I had an OK time watching it. But I’m never going to watch it again.

UNLIKE Megalopolis, oh my god.

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I saw megalopolis and I liked it. My co-worker and I have been joking about it ever since we heard about the scene where someone in the theater talks to Adam Driver. I even made wii box art for it.

To me, the aesthetic of the movie felt like a mix of the Batman quadrilogy from the 90s, the Wachowskis’ Speed Racer, and various Shakespeare live plays I’ve seen. (setting, editing, performance)

I loved all the Rome equivalents at the start, but I did feel like the movie went on a bit too long.

edit: oh yeah the costumes were great, love everyone wearing cloaks all the time

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Internet video game discourse has granted me the vocabulary to say the new Coppola movie forty years in the making has a Piss Filter

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do i even need to say what movie i’m about to see

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I’m coming at you with with the wrong answers only:

  • Megalopolis
  • Alien: Romulus
  • The Count of Monte Cristo
  • Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace