MovieChat Forums > Ace_Spade > Replies
Ace_Spade's Replies
The Christmas thing makes sense.
I do wonder if Kubrick is hinting at the Pagan solstice holidays which were celebrated at the same time of year. After all, Bill is about to head off into a place that has a lot in common with Pagan ritual - masks and cloaks (druidic?), an emphasis on sex, and possibly even a blood sacrifice (the girl at the party).
Of course, somebody needing to die for Bill's transgression might just as easily be a Christianity thing... I might need to rewatch the movie.
Does he explore Christianity in other films of his? Are you sure Eyes Wide Shut is specifically addressing Christianity?
Looks really, really funny to me.
Only you can answer the question of whether or not you want to watch it. If your morality goes against that of the creators of the film - in this case, Seinfeld - and you don't want to give anything Seinfeld is part of a click, view, or dollar, then yeah, you should avoid it.
I have a friend who can't watch Woody Allen movies anymore. He finds the real world has imposed itself on Woody's films, so he can't get into them or enjoy them. It's as much a psychological block as it is a moral stance. So, if you won't be able to focus on the film or enjoy the movie because you'll be thinking about Israel and Palestine the whole time, that's another reason to not watch.
For myself, I separate art from artists and enjoy work pretty much no matter who's involved. I've watched and loved Roman Polanski movies like Carnage and Ghostwriter (although I didn't actually know the latter was Polanski until I guessed it was his style from about 1/3 of the way in). So, Polanski is as guilty as sin and of a pretty heinous crime and I still can detach enough to enjoy the films. I still think he should serve his sentence and be punished, but that doesn't mean I'm going to not appreciate art.
I'm planning to watch Unfrosted as soon as I can. I think it looks great. Of course, I'm also not anti-Israel, so it wouldn't bother me, anyway.
That's one of the things I find funniest about it: this is a petty, silly thing to make a movie about. That's funnier than making it about something "important." I mean, I guess it could still be funny, it's just then it would be more satire and less just goofy, silly fun. I laughed my butt off at the trailer. If the movie's half as good, it'll be well worth watching.
I think it's because Unfrosted is a period piece. It's set in an era when the posters would have looked like that, so they're going with the aesthetic. I love it.
I like that painted montage look, anyway, so if it comes back, so much the better.
Unbreakable is an incredible movie! I love that one and I can't believe I forgot about it when I made my list - jeez, I guess 2 years ago.
Did you like the sequels? I enjoyed them, too. I liked Unbreakable far more than either Split or Glass, but I still really like M. Night Shayamalan's superhero saga as a whole. I think I'd watch more of it, too, if he decided to keep pursuing the ongoing mythology he's creating.
If Bill and Alice were grounded in a sincere pursuit of Christian spirituality, yes, I agree that they would have been more stable in their marriage.
But, of course, if they were then we wouldn't have much of a movie.
Doesn't bother me. I didn't see the live action one, but the original isn't really one of the better animated films, so it seems like improvement was on the table.
Meredith Chivers did a study that disagrees a bit...
"Women showed a significant increase in genital arousal to a non-human sexual stimulus, but did not report being sexually aroused by this stimulus. This means the sexual cues in the film were sufficient to activate an automatic genital response, but not a psychological experience of sexual arousal."
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228379474_A_brief_review_and_discussion_of_sex_differences_in_the_specificity_of_sexual_arousal
So, maybe at least women are subconsciously interested in bonobo sex. In which case, the fact that the monster-human sex pairing in this movie had a human female was perhaps scientifically valid.
I'm reading between the lines, but it seems like he's interpreting the movie as the hallucination/fantasy of a person who decides to go on a psychotic rampage. I think he's saying that Neo was really - as the detractors sorta said from day one - a corollary of people like the Columbine shooters or other angry young men. He's saying Neo is just grabbing guns (lots of guns) and shooting innocent people, imagining himself as "The One," but really he's just a messed up dude with antisocial issues.
I think.
But I think I'm meeting him more than halfway here.
Ah, I see what you mean. Yes, Star Wars as a franchise is, for the most part, more of a true "Family movie" section where it has a broad appeal and should entertain across demographics. I actually miss that. Because streaming services are able to cater to really, really niche markets, they tend to make things designed for very specific, narrow brackets, and there are fewer TV shows that you can sit down and watch together with a wide group of people.
Any book will have to take some warping to squeeze into a film's runtime. But that doesn't mean they have to be shallow or watered down. I think the two Dune films do a pretty good job of accessing the book's major themes and providing a high degree of nuance and subtlety. Ironically, I'd argue that much of this is in how Villeneuve presents the material. It would be impossible to slavishly recreate every word of Herbert's novel without stretching the series into far more than two films. However, Villeneuve optimises his work by showing us the small things that make up the bigger picture, coming across in performances and the way he shoots each moment.
And, yes, I know he changed a bunch of stuff, but most of that didn't really bug me.
Well, while I disagree with you on Dune falling below the mark, I disagree with you on Villeneuve dumbing things down or not managing to access depth with his filmmaking, and I disagree that he's fumbled sci-fi films (I think the Dunes are both great, I enjoyed Blade Runner 2049, and I absolutely love Arrival), we have found common ground at last: Timeline was rubbish.
Star Wars isn't guy-focused action?
It's wild how much I disagree. The Prequels seem largely dead and lifeless to me. The shots are kinda boring, the characters dull me out (which doesn't help) and because the momentum of the story is dead, the whole thing comes off as lacklustre. Don't get me wrong, it's not bad, it's just mostly okay. I'll agree that there are some impressive CG landscapes and fights, but the atmosphere largely amounts to "so what?"
I do like a lot of Naboo, especially the capital city, but I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that they're shooting in a real location, so it doesn't seem like mere technical wizardry, but like a great travel documentary with a too-busy foreground.
As to Villeneuve, I wouldn't describe his work as boring. The shots he chooses, to me, reveal worlds and almost always make me really *feel* the epic nature of the universe he's building up. He doesn't just put the shots in for their own sakes, either, but uses the visuals to set scenes, pace action, and reveal character (he does some great stuff with the water of the Atreides homeworld just before they all leave for dust and sand and sun - really nice work).
I agree that the spacecraft and sandworms were interesting, but I disagree that nothing else was. The costumes were. The compositions of his photography were. The way he frames and shoots scenes was.
Frankly, I think he does a magnificent job of shooting "just" sand. He makes me feel a sense of place on Arrakis in a similar way that Leone makes me feel the deserts in his westerns.
I'm not saying I'm "right" with any of this - everybody has their own experiences - but my processing of the Dune films, and my processing of the cinematography of the Prequels, is (I think) almost polar opposite to yours.
I think Villeneuve is one of the most stylish and visually interesting filmmakers I've seen in a long time. And I've gotta say, the Star Wars Prequels don't look half as nice as Dune and Dune 2. The shot composition, the way the set pieces are framed and presented - everything, really - is just much, much more satisfying and breathtaking than what was going on in the Prequels. Well, to me, anyway.
I always think about the story where George Lucas visited Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York set. At the time, Lucas was shooting The Phantom Menace. After touring the massive soundstage with the Five Points set (built in part by Daniel Day-Lewis!) Lucas commented to Scorsese, "You can just use computers to build all of this stuff now."
Now, I'm not sure of the exact wording, but I laughed when I read that story. Scorsese's craftsmanship in bringing Gangs of New York to the screen dwarfs TPM. And I'm not saying CGI doesn't have its use. But I am saying that TPM and the other Prequels feel kinda flat to me. Dune felt like holding my breath for three hours. It's a really good looking film - and a great film in-general.
I feel like "long-suffering girl is domestic slave to step-family" only lasts so long on its own. Basically, whoever was creating the story for the film just had trouble sticking to the fairy tale and also making the movie any fun for kids to watch.
A little creativity could have done it, or altering Cinderella to be a little unexpected or unorthodox. If she was a bit of a prankster/saboteur, for instance, we could have had fun watching her be defiant in humorous and clandestine ways. But Cindy has to be the good-est, sweetest girl on the planet, so they had to introduce other, more chaotic characters.
The Prince falls victim to the same thing, which is basically that a romantic lead often winds up a little bland and boring. We don't want six scenes of him pining because he cannot find true love. Nor was Disney, apparently, interested in giving him more of an arc which would elevate him past his basic story function.
Joel Cairo's scented handkerchiefs...
Fair enough; Buddy Holly was just following orders from Jackrabbit Slim...
Either they decided on it between films or maybe they didn't have the budget to do it on the first one (I know it was a HUGE budget, but they might have eaten up the costs elsewhere).
Here's a quote from Villenueve:
"I love this idea and I tried, for Giedi Prime, the home world of Harkonnen, there's less information in the book and it's a world that is disconnected from nature. It's a plastic world. So, I thought that it could be interesting if the light, the sunlight could give us some insight on their psyche. What if instead of revealing colors, the sunlight was killing them and creating a very eerie black and white world, that will give us information about how these people perceive reality, about their political system, about how that primitive brutalist culture and it was in the screenplay."
The interview is here: https://www.moviefone.com/news/dune-part-two-exclusive-interview-denis-villeneuve/
Didn't say he was. I was just trying to more-or-less neutrally present why people dislike him.
I'm back-and-forth on her performance in this film. Parts of it she seems kinda flat and lacks nuance. Parts seem like she's too childish. But there are a few moments - mostly towards the end - that I loved.
So, first, there's no excuse for her "flat" moments, other than the fact that the character is a bit stoic and that can be hard to do on-screen. Clint Eastwood is really good at being both stoic and dynamic, but it's a rare gift. Zendaya might either not have "it" or not have the experience necessary.
Still, for the record, I think mostly she's "fine," she's just not great.
As to the "childish" moments, this might not be fair. Zendaya looks young. Maybe this is just a miscasting issue, but it's certainly not her fault if her fully adult face still looks like a child's face, and therefore a little pouty, when she's angry or frustrated. Now, this doesn't change the fact that some of those scenes fell flat for me - because she seems a bit immature - but I can't blame Zendaya for that. This isn't an acting problem. This is just a typecasting issue. The worst I can say about that is that she can't (or didn't) rise above her "type," which is extremely hard to do. Not many people can get an audience to forget their physical reality. So, again, while sometimes this made me less than thrilled with her performance, I can't put it as a strike against her ability.
But I'll finish off with a moment that I think was worth whatever else was going on with Zendaya. And there are SPOILERS below.
Towards the end of the film, Paul and Chani are growing farther and farther apart. She's never been angrier with him, and she unleashes some fury his way. Something like that. And Paul goes over to her and says, "I want you to know: I will love you as long as I breathe." And he's saying, "I understand the situation and the rift between us, but this is still true." And she takes that in, recognises it, and fights to keep down the love and sorrow she feels. We see her face spasm a bit, and Zendaya perfectly blends the confusion, conflict, sorrow, and anger that Chani is experiencing. It's truly subtle and a really difficult work is accomplished, showing us about three layers of emotion and thought within that character.
So, ultimately, I think Zendaya did a good job. Imperfect and flawed, yes, but overall she was worth it.