I guess in an attempt to be a little smarter and less lazy about my comments: I get that he’s being “good” on the subject of “marginal” people and “sex” but I don’t think there’s much insight or depth in his films as yet. So it’s like this positive objectification at least to me
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I kinda agree but also thought it was one of the best movies in years
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playing devil’s advocate: i suppose i would struggle to call the florida project a movie with insight or depth, but outside of being a good frame by frame moving picture, it faithfully depicted what life can be like sometimes. i didn’t need any more from it than that.
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Basically I trust him completely behind a camera and not at all behind a typewriter
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yeah it might just be a particular set of cultural resentments that makes me feel this way. Like why does eg Werner Herzog not seem like he’s doing poverty/trauma rubbernecking. American mfa film school is just irritating to me fair or not to the actual work
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on all other things, i am with you. but something about that willem dafoe….
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i mean, i guess it’s still worth seeing! could’ve been a fluke too, i remember enjoying tangerine way back when (though to be fair i was very very stoned when i watched it). i just felt like… in this one, he’s treating sex work metaphorically/allegorically, and not being super careful about where that leads him. it felt like it was about how the men around anora see her and not about, like, anora herself; she didn’t feel like a developed character. and that could be fine but given the way the movie pretty freely objectifies her it felt to me like it was recreating the misogynist view that a lot of people have about sex workers without necessarily going far enough to critique or complicate that view. i don’t consider myself a stickler for needing a movie to have A Moral, but sex workers are already so stigmatized, and cinema has viewed women as objects for so long, that i felt really unsatisfied with where this movie landed.
but i also know people for whom the movie did work. ymmv!
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I would be okay with a universe where Jim Carrey played Wyatt Earp in Tombstone. It feels kind of like Dr. Robotnik is preparation for the role.
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I think wirhout Mikey Madison giving the performance of a lifetime the movie falls apart at the seams.
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yup!! she totally slayed, i hope she gets work forever
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So has anyone figured out what game Ivan was playing on his xbox in Anora?
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Getting incredibly into Merchant Ivory movies…. Always wanted more of call me by your name, turns out that old British dude and his pals were making one like every year for fifty years.
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Nice! Definitely light up Maurice and also maybe Howard’s End.
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It’s definitely not a movie with a clear message but I find myself chewing on it a lot since I saw it. There’s an interesting generational conflict between Anya and Ivan’s handler Toros, her seeing him as a judgemental, paternalistic authority figure and him seeing her and everyone else her age as a vain, spoiled brat, neither quite able to recognize that they both have an unhealthy, transactional relationship with this family that they’d be better off without. Lots of misplaced anger and resentment between working class people who lack the power to stand up to the people exploiting them.
That’s part of why I think Anora comes across as underdeveloped - she doesn’t really get to have any honest interactions with anyone until she’s left with Igor at the end of the movie. She has to treat customers with the utmost affection and deference, and she’s so used to being judged for her profession that she treats almost everyone else with immediate hostility. I had a bit of a “Bruce Willis was dead the whole time” moment when she cried boning Igor in his car at the end and I realized it’s the most intimate sex scene in the movie and it’s the only one where you see no nudity. Even when she was married to Ivan she still treated him like a customer.
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So uhhh my friend was working as a projectionist at a movie festival and he projected Megalopolis for Coppola himself
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i see that! and i have also been thinking about it a lot since watching it. i didn’t buy that she would ever allow herself to be vulnerable in front of igor when he bound and gagged her in a way that is reminiscent of sexual assault. or at least, that’s a red line for me as a viewer where i feel that it either needs to be handled in a delicate way or it has to go full bad-taste exploitation, and this movie does neither. i felt like in order to sell them becoming close, the movie has to downplay her feelings about what happened - up to and including playing the scene where it happens as comedy.
it felt like it had a very totalizing/flattening view of class struggle, that doesn’t fully think through how men and women experience things differently due to misogyny. and i guess there’s only so much depth you can fit into a two-hour fictional movie that also has to be entertaining but it just fell far short for me.
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hell yeah
just left the movie theatre. looked like Helldivers 2 to me
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finally saw “perfect days” as it was playing at the art museum.
what a movie. every scene was nourishing. deeply resonant and contemplative, but honest and tactile. i don’t know if life really is that beautiful, but the film makes you think it can be.
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Tonight am showing “LEFTOVERS”. Cuz it’s that time again, for movies that I had planned on showing at one point or another but did not, because of “reasons” (technically it’s “MORE LEFTOVERS” cuz I did this before, during the previous Thanksgiving season)
Anyhow, first is a movie that was originally earmarked for “LAW & (DIS)ORDER”…
Second is a movie that was originally intended for “LOST IN TIME”, by the same director of Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes, which some may calling seen via FUTURE IMPERFECT"…
Third is a movie that I was going to play during both “MIND OVER MATTER” and “THE KIDS ARE NOT ALRIGHT” (those familiar with both themes will understand why)…
And last but not least was something originally scheduled for “ROAD RAGE”…
The stream will again be via the alt account, starting around 8PM-ish EST…
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