LaraQ
Badass
English Rose
Posts: 2,302
Likes: 2,835
|
Post by LaraQ on Sept 9, 2020 16:31:18 GMT
I was looking forward to this film so much and .....I hated it.
|
|
|
Post by DeepArcher on Sept 9, 2020 16:59:55 GMT
His best movie ( Eternal Sunshine) is a bigtime ripoff of a George Saunders story anyway. Waaaait which one?? ... I feel like it might be one I haven't read unless I'm just totally drawing a blank. The movie is very Saunders-y though now that you mention it...
|
|
|
Post by Viced on Sept 9, 2020 17:07:44 GMT
His best movie ( Eternal Sunshine) is a bigtime ripoff of a George Saunders story anyway. Waaaait which one?? ... I feel like it might be one I haven't read unless I'm just totally drawing a blank. The movie is very Saunders-y though now that you mention it... Offloading for Mrs. SchwartzObviously not a total ripoff... but stealing enough of the concept to rub me the wrong way.
|
|
|
Post by mikediastavrone96 on Sept 9, 2020 23:42:34 GMT
It's only been a couple days and I'm already liking it less than I already did. Feels like Kaufman's laziest exploration of his favorite pet themes (identity, memory, mortality, lonely and depressed guys in general) with a half-assed The Usual Suspects conceit.
I think part of my issue with Kaufman between this and Synecdoche is they lack the emotional complexity and three-dimensional vitality of his earlier screenplays (which is also in Anomalisa for a bit, though I want to note he wrote it in 2005 pre-Synecdoche). His writing has become far more insular and more bluntly focused on reinforcing the depression he has openly discussed constantly bending towards above all else. Lead characters are interested in nothing more than wallowing in their own misery, and supporting characters only serve to push them in more miserable directions. In this movie's case, all of them just happen to be in the mind of the same person, can't get any more insular than that.
|
|
|
Post by HELENA MARIA on Sept 10, 2020 19:00:32 GMT
A brilliant mindfuck of a film (Charlie Kaufman style), even though it's not for everyone.A truly beautiful cinematic experience that keeps you guessing what is real and what isn't up until the very end. Incredibly satisfying when everything finally clicks and the pieces all fall right into place. The performances are splendid, and this is another one of Toni Collette's recent work.Jessie Buckley is incredible too (as the matter of fact, the whole cast is superb). The film takes these wild turns and packs different punches. It's got the mystery and the thinking. It's worth at least one watch. However,the real stars of the movie are the editing and directing which manage to confuse and create dreamlike qualities while maintaining criticisms of our modern society and of the current movie industry.
8/10
|
|
|
Post by JangoB on Sept 12, 2020 19:40:12 GMT
What the film did wonderfully for me was the way it captured a feeling of experiencing memories. I've said numerous times that I have a special spot for movies presented from a first-person POV in which you get transported into someone else's psyche, especially those movies that specifically do it through cinematic means. This was a very strong example of that. I really dug it. I haven't read the source material so I also really enjoyed the process of the movie revealing more and more of itself to me during the viewing. As I understand, the book spells things out much more concretely and, well, I'm glad the film did its own thing if that is indeed the case.
|
|
Drish
Badass
Posts: 2,017
Likes: 1,752
|
Post by Drish on Sept 14, 2020 14:40:47 GMT
I don't know what to think of it. I appreciate what it's trying to show and how but I really didn't like it as a whole. The one thing I took from it is Jesse Plemons is one hell of an actor. Crazy good in this.
|
|
Pasquale
Full Member
Posts: 539
Likes: 227
|
Post by Pasquale on Nov 24, 2020 15:38:59 GMT
Mindblowing
|
|
|
Post by The_Cake_of_Roth on Dec 1, 2020 8:00:06 GMT
Finally got around to this and found it to be a tedious slog. I wasn't big on Kaufman's last two directorial efforts, so I wasn't sure how much I'd like this going in, but I didn't expect to dislike it as much as I did. Owen Gleiberman's review has a great line where he says that Kaufman hasn't grown as an artist, but has curdled instead. The guy is 62 and it's like his worldview is still that of a depressed high schooler who just discovered Nietzsche. I suppose some viewers might get something out of figuring out how everything "fits," in light of the ending, but I don't really think I was given enough reason to care long before the twist is revealed. Like others have said, I'm not sure there's much more for me to gain on rewatch. Easily my least favourite thing I've seen by Kaufman (as a writer or director).
|
|
|
Post by wilcinema on Dec 1, 2020 10:28:49 GMT
Until they leave the house, I thought the movie was doing great. It was inventive, interesting, just the right amount of weird and unsettling. After that, it becomes a catalogue of Kaufman's obsessions with little to no restraint. Even the twist, which was supposed to be this big reveal, wasn't that surprising. There is a reason why Kaufman's best movies are the ones where he is not the director (I'm not a fan of Synecdoche): Jonze and Gondry understood him and his quirks and knew how to deal with his weirdness. Letting him direct his own movies only results in over-indulging solipsism, and each time this is getting worse. I knew what he was trying to say but he just kept banging on my head with it while there was no need for it. This movie is not bad per se but it's disappointing because he had a great technical department and a great cast, and the one you would think would never fail with this kind of stuff was him, and he ruined it.
|
|
|
Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Apr 16, 2021 4:00:06 GMT
ok, so now that I've seen the film twice I can say confidently that I like it and kind of get what it's going for re: Kaufman's constant obsession with depressive, toxic men. my review from letterboxd: I enjoyed this before I had any idea what it meant. Now that I have a sense of what it's "about", I enjoyed it even more. There's something about the film's jarringly, oppressively awkward exchanges that tickles my schadenfreude funny bone. I love movies where everything goes wrong, so you could say I enjoy parts of this film for the same sadistic (or masochistic?) reasons that After Hours, a dark comedy that traffics in castration jokes, is my favorite Scorsese film, or The Killing of a Sacred Deer, ostensibly a psychological thriller, is one of my favorite comedies of the last decade in which none of the people act like people. This film is made up almost entirely of awkward exchanges--conversations that aren't conversations, distanced interactions between incompatible beings who can't seem to read social cues. The characters stutter, pause, repeat themselves, contradict themselves, talk over each other, change the subject. It's halfway amusing, halfway disturbing. Kaufman heightens the oppressiveness of these situations in conjunction with editor Robert Frazen, whose jarring cut serves as a constant reminder that none of these characters are inhabiting the same space, but leaves room for comedy too. Like the beat when Buckley listens to a voice message from "Yvonne" that sounds like the rantings of a crazed serial killer and she hangs up her phone, announcing "she's fine." Regarding the "about" of it all, it's easier to follow what Kaufman is implying if you go into the film knowing that the Buckley character is a figment of Jake's imagination, and that the "real" Jake is the highschool janitor. I didn't read much analysis to get there, only that one idea, and it opens the floodgates to what's really going on here. What's really going on here is quintessential Kaufman mindfuckery about the depressive male psyche--in this case an existential reckoning with the kind of everyday toxic maleness that spins loneliness into victimhood and reflects violence inward and outward in an eternal downward spiral of embittered self-pity and self-fulfilling prophecy.
Kaufman presenting Buckley as the protagonist is a clever gimmick meant to disguise that this story is wholly about an old and pathetic man who feels spurned by a world robbed of his genius. Thinking back on his failures, imagining successes, crescendoing into those final minutes finding Jake in stage makeup performing musical theater in front of his adoring fans. The kind of guy who says he isn't that interested in musical theater but goes on to list fifteen musicals. That final performance is a last-breath grasp at meaning as, in the truck, he thinks of ending things.
Buckley's character is a fascinating contradiction. Both a manifestation of Jake's imagined "hidden" genius (I mean genus), but also an imagined trophy girlfriend who's intelligent, professional and artistic, but in her own right a confused and insecure woman who doesn't know how to say "no." She exists in the film in two worlds, both in his head and in her own. That adds another level of storytelling and allows her to have a semblance of agency in this metacontext as a life within a life, or on the other hand, one could take it that Jake's imagination of a trophy girlfriend who plans on inevitably dumping him is perhaps a final stinging denouncement of his metaphorical (and probably literal) virginity. Good date movie.
|
|