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Post by reggaetapes on Nov 10, 2018 1:15:35 GMT
Saw this film last week and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since. Brilliant performances from the cast, and Chang-dong Lee's direction is sublime. This film is quite simply a masterpiece. Has anyone else got a chance to see this yet?
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Post by DeepArcher on Nov 10, 2018 3:30:20 GMT
Have really only heard amazing things about this. Can't wait to see it, I'm just not sure when I'll be able to.
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Post by mhynson27 on Nov 10, 2018 4:59:33 GMT
Saw it at SFF earlier in the year. Didn't like it as much as most but Steven Yeun was freaking great.
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Post by Joaquim on Nov 10, 2018 5:07:02 GMT
Wasn't this the title of that Bradley Cooper chef movie merc was obsessing about a few years ago before they switched the title a million times? Or am I thinking of something else?
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Post by bob-coppola on Nov 10, 2018 5:17:39 GMT
Joaquim That was (is) Burnt (awful title).
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Post by Joaquim on Nov 10, 2018 5:23:26 GMT
Joaquim That was (is) Burnt (awful title). Close enough.
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Post by fiosnasiob on Nov 10, 2018 9:37:28 GMT
That's the thing, others than all its great qualities, you simply can't stop thinking (and talking) about it. Best film I saw this year.
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Film Socialism
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Post by Film Socialism on Nov 10, 2018 16:52:29 GMT
it reminds me of a bunch of arthouse stuff i caught on netflix (The Experimenter, Force majeure, Arabian Nights, Victoria, Phoenix etc.) that i overall enjoyed a good deal but wouldn't say is essential or anything. strong 7 to light 8. it has one really bad scene that kinda hinders it from doin much better and i think the direction it chooses to go (since it was ambiguous at the start) was interesting but could have been more.
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Post by The_Cake_of_Roth on Nov 18, 2018 20:44:15 GMT
The first hour of this reeeeally drags, but by the end it gets under your skin and kind of plays like a more enigmatic Spoorloos, with commentary on class, alienation, the elusiveness of truth and its unknowability. I'm not sure its length is entirely justified, and I wish it were a bit tighter, but this film has stayed with me more than most things I've seen this year. Haunting stuff.
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Post by getclutch on Nov 19, 2018 19:18:23 GMT
A great film. Cannot think of a film that has done so well to create a mystery that cannot be unraveled, while still giving you so much information.
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Post by stephen on Jan 15, 2019 3:31:46 GMT
God knows I’ve been looking forward to this one all year, but I gotta say, it left me feeling a little . . . empty. Much like Roma, it felt like an exercise in ambition more than anything else. It also really feels its length at a weighty 150 minutes.
Lee Chang-dong’s great at setting moods, and indeed a dreary and foreboding pall hangs over the entirety of Burning . . . but I don’t know if I necessarily agree with the approach he took to this story of budding obsession. It’s almost too low-key for its own good. I don’t know if part of it is that I feel that the story positively wallows in its protagonist’s mundanity to the point of tedium, but I certainly don’t agree that the movie earns its payoff, nor do I think that the object of his affection/fixation justifies the story itself. I’m not saying that he needed to go full on De Palma or anything (never go full De Palma), but I feel that he left things a bit too vague and didn’t commit when he should’ve done.
Things don’t really fare all that better on the acting front for me. Yoo Ah-in’s performance failed to really rivet me or endear me to his character, who is too much of a cipher for his own good. Jeon Jong-seo’s Have-mi is treated less as a character and more of a prop as the sort of quasi-manic pixie dream girl at the center of the story. Steven Yeun, who has been reaping plenty of critical plaudits, is the best of the three by a wide margin, but even he is bogged down in the veritable quagmire that is this film and rarely is able to galvanize it to his fullest potential.
I’ve not read Haruki Murakami’s story (he remains a critical blind spot for me in terms of literature), but sadly this film didn’t engender any feelings on picking up his work anytime soon.
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morton
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Post by morton on Jan 15, 2019 9:37:02 GMT
The first hour of this reeeeally drags, but by the end it gets under your skin and kind of plays like a more enigmatic Spoorloos, with commentary on class, alienation, the elusiveness of truth and its unknowability. I'm not sure its length is entirely justified, and I wish it were a bit tighter, but this film has stayed with me more than most things I've seen this year. Haunting stuff. I'm glad to find a similar opinion. I liked it more later on because it did stay with me moreso than a lot of films after I watch them, but I was getting very restless during that first hour.
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Post by pacinoyes on Jan 15, 2019 9:56:20 GMT
Loved it mostly, my personal #3 of the year and in many ways the very best film - at least its best parts hit at that high level.
Cut down the opening and exposition - the length is oppressive early on - and well you'd have a masterpiece and I'd have a new #1. But anyone with an interest (and why wouldn't you have an interest?) in the plot mechanics but not the style of the best of Argento, DePalma, Polanski, Chabrol - the big post-Hitch substance and presentation masters will find much to savor here. When this film gets rolling it plays out in a sort of all encompassing, enveloping dread.
I have seen this director's previous film, the penetrating but imo contrived Poetry. This is a major step up. Here it plays much more literally and elusively simultaneously - you may not necessarily believe or know for sure that all the scenes are literally happening as shown.
At its best it is rife with a sort of dead end apprehension towards everything - cultural, sexual, class, political, personal - how is the one defined from the two and then three and then...... all of us (?) In addition this film's script lays on a ton of metaphors and symbolism that as they add up make you feel uneasy (and terrified) about the world you live in and your control over it.
I always talk about how films in a lot of ways are bullshit - that they have to (or should when possible) represent the right now and almost never do. Burning actually does it almost too well really.....
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Jan 20, 2019 6:32:22 GMT
But... is Steven Yeun guilty or is the protagonist just jealous of and threatened by him? God I love movies that make you speculate. It's why Picnic at Hanging Rock is my favorite film. The mystery of the question and what it might imply is so much more mysterious and tantalizing and maddening than any possible answer. Although it moves at a challenging pace and for all its genre trappings isn't particularly suspenseful on a surface level, this film's power resides most in what it doesn't show. It points the viewer in a direction and leaves them to do the work, leaving just enough subtext between the lines to provide possible conclusions that vary based on how one perceives that central question. Whether it's a film about sexual or class politics or both, it would be a masterpiece in either right. This is hands down one of the best films of the year. And Steven Yeun is exceptional. One could write an entire essay on his performance alone. Mysterious, cool, sexy, distant. Constantly judging and sizing up others but never revealing it outwardly or letting down his guard. Smug and self-satisfied, appealing and serpentine. The performance is as much a beguiling enigma as the film around it.
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Jan 20, 2019 7:26:45 GMT
the more I think of it the more I'm convinced of its brilliance.
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Post by reggaetapes on Jan 21, 2019 23:39:23 GMT
Well said. Burning is my favorite film of the year and has stayed with me longer than any other movie from the year. Throughout the film things may not be as they seem, and the film’s underlying message speaks to class divides and disillusion felt by youth in many countries today. Here's a nice review from Variety which I really enjoyed: variety.com/2018/film/reviews/burning-review-beoning-1202812196/
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Post by Deleted on Jan 22, 2019 17:32:03 GMT
My new #1 of 2018. I can’t stop thinking about it.
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Post by DeepArcher on Feb 4, 2019 5:33:34 GMT
The only Haruki Murakami work I've read is his acclaimed novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which I read very recently and had an incredibly mixed response to. Assuming that Murakami is like any other writer and has underlying constancies in all of his work, then it's pretty clear to me that Burning realizes his literary style rather loyally and vividly. In fact, when looking at Wind-Up Bird and Burning side-by-side, the number of very specific similarities is quite frankly striking: elusive cats, strange phone-calls, falling down (dry) wells. Though most significant is that both are stories of a hapless protagonist with no discernible direction who develops an intense jealousy of a successful, well-liked man roughly the same age as him, which ultimately transforms into a lethal resentment. Both protagonists are drawn into conflict by the seduction of a female caricature (multiple in the case of Wind-Up Bird), complete with sexual encounters that feel like little more than pure male fantasy. Both stories focus exquisitely on day-to-day mundanities all the while including so many extraneous plot threads for the sake of some vague sense of "world-building" or "characterization," but that ultimately seem futile when they're not rewarding. The similarities are so many in number that I do have to wonder if it's intentional. After all, this is a short story adaptation that is as long as a Marvel product with twenty-three main characters, so you'd have to imagine that a great number of gaps had to be filled in with material invented for the film -- and that the writers naturally drew from Murakami's other work to fill out said spaces while staying true to his world. While I know absolutely nothing of "Barn Burning" and can't speak with certainty about its loyalty as an adaptation, these thoughts couldn't escape my mind during the course of a film that I was largely indifferent towards.
Considering how mixed I was on Wind-Up Bird as a novel, it should go without saying that the fact that I found many traces of that in here made it rather problematic. Don't get me wrong: Burning is a respectably crafted film, complete with gorgeous cinematography and a phenomenal, textured score. The pace is deliberate and often in an effective way, especially with a second half that gradually gets under your skin as it quietly ramps-up the tension. That said, so much of this film doesn't go anywhere, and so much of it is almost just vacuous, that it was only rarely that it inspired anything meaningful in me. Even some of the film's most memorable moments are ultimately borderline laughable in how by-the-book they are for films of this type: namely a much talked about moment in which our trio of characters smoke weed at sunset while Hae-mi, the female of the group, precedes to take her clothes off and slowly dance to what I'm sure is an authentic jazz track but sounds an awful lot like a Badalamenti score. It's a beautifully-shot moment brimming with atmosphere, but it's so damn familiar and predictable in its MPDG-worshipping and idea of drug-induced liberation/confusion. Much of Burning is like this, a faulty product with absolutely exquisite presentation. Steven Yeun has a certain magnetism whenever he's on-screen, and his Gatsby-esque character is easily the standout of the trio when compared to the zombie-like protagonist and a cliched love interest, but even he is not given enough direct focus to make a lasting impression. It's a film that doesn't truly know its strengths, and ultimately seems confused about what it's supposed to say about all of the things on its mind. There are quite a few truly riveting moments here -- especially towards the end -- and that may very well be enough to redeem it, but the whole is just so confused and scattered that I'm not sure I can get behind it.
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Post by Sharbs on Feb 11, 2019 7:45:42 GMT
2018 is kicking my ass
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Post by theycallmemrfish on Feb 11, 2019 15:45:56 GMT
This is on Hoopla, for those of you that have it.
I thought it was solid... but holy fuck was it LONNNNNGGGGGGGG. Way too long. At least half an hour of that runtime needed to go.
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Post by pacinoyes on Mar 19, 2019 22:40:42 GMT
For those curious what all of the fuss is about from me anyway.........this film one of 2018s very best imo will be on Netflix April 29th.
An "extended" version of Hateful 8 - hmmmmmm on 4/25 btw.
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Post by theycallmemrfish on Mar 19, 2019 23:22:49 GMT
For those curious what all of the fuss is about from me anyway.........this film one of 2018s very best imo will be on Netflix April 29th. An "extended" version of Hateful 8 - hmmmmmm on 4/25 btw.
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Zeb31
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Post by Zeb31 on Mar 19, 2019 23:53:43 GMT
An "extended" version of Hateful 8 - hmmmmmm on 4/25 btw. That's probably the roadshow cut, no? I vaguely remember something about the special 70mm screenings they held back in 2015 being like 15-20 minutes longer.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 20, 2019 3:59:36 GMT
One of the few films where going in an ambiguous direction narratively actually made me like it less overall. Yeun gives a strong performance and I found a few sequences towards the beginning interesting, but by the end of it I really didn't care whether the perpetually slack-jawed lead killed an innocent douche as the result of paranoia that crept out of his repressed frustrations due to his family's social situation or not.
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Post by pacinoyes on Apr 30, 2019 0:43:11 GMT
Just a reminder, Burning premiered on Netflix today.....2nd viewing and loved it even more tbh - reviewed earlier in this thread.....
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