Movies Talk

the guy has larry clarke vibes

Iā€™ve only seen the Florida project. I resisted it for the longest time but ended up finding it very earnest and affecting.

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hey bourgeoise people can make good art and be offputting and weird while doing it :person_shrugging: so maybe not even worth mentioning as there are greater sins in this world. But his whole deal is a little strange to me

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I agree. Thatā€™s why I had no interest in the Florida project and was surprised when I liked it as much as I did. Was hoping he could strike twice with the new one.

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I guess in an attempt to be a little smarter and less lazy about my comments: I get that heā€™s being ā€œgoodā€ on the subject of ā€œmarginalā€ people and ā€œsexā€ but I donā€™t think thereā€™s much insight or depth in his films as yet. So itā€™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 devilā€™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 didnā€™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 heā€™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 dafoeā€¦.

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i mean, i guess itā€™s still worth seeing! couldā€™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 likeā€¦ in this one, heā€™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 didnā€™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 donā€™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 moviesā€¦. 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 Howardā€™s End.

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Itā€™s definitely not a movie with a clear message but I find myself chewing on it a lot since I saw it. Thereā€™s an interesting generational conflict between Anya and Ivanā€™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 theyā€™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.

Thatā€™s part of why I think Anora comes across as underdeveloped - she doesnā€™t really get to have any honest interactions with anyone until sheā€™s left with Igor at the end of the movie. She has to treat customers with the utmost affection and deference, and sheā€™s so used to being judged for her profession that she treats almost everyone else with immediate hostility. I had a bit of a ā€œBruce Willis was dead the whole timeā€ moment when she cried boning Igor in his car at the end and I realized itā€™s the most intimate sex scene in the movie and itā€™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 didnā€™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, thatā€™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 doesnā€™t fully think through how men and women experience things differently due to misogyny. and i guess thereā€™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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