OT: (But some Psycho connection): J-Law Flops Big with "Mother!" - Psycho (1960) Discussion

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Anyway, Mother opened poorly, and got some bad reviews (80-something curmudgeon Rex Reed calls it "the worst movie of the century") and an "F" score from some populist grading system -- "F" for the movie, and "F" for J-Law in it.

Will J-Law survive?

Oh, probably. She got that star launch from several years ago, one-two-three

Winters Bone (Oscar nom and she's great and real in it -- I believed her as dirt poor)
The Hunger Games(made her rich)
Silver Linings Playbook(got her the Best Actress Oscar at 22)

and that kind of launch buys you a lot of flop movies.

Moreover, "Mother" is an ARTY flop movie which did get some good reviews, and which was evidently latched onto by some serious critics desperate to have an art film to analyze.

(The question is begged: why was Mother released wide? Why not off to the art houses? Well, its evidently not THAT good.)

I did notice this: They have started showing a teaser trailer for J-Law's next one(next March): "Red Sparrow." In the trailer,she is in various stages of sexy dress and undress(including a killer bathing suit.) The rather sad and cynical message to me is: "Hold on, boys, J-Law's comin' back next year as a sex goddess! We know why YOU go to the movies!" She also seems to be playing a be-wigged Russian spy type with some of Charlize Thereon's action moves from Atomic Blonde.

I figure that J-Laws handlers rushed the "Red Sparrow" trailer out to make sure we forget about "Mother."

As for J-Law herself, she has recently said that she will be taking two years off from making movies. Worked for Bill Murray(four years in his case) except when he came back...he wasn't a star anymore. And the snipers have been sniping about J-Laws "string of failures": Joy(got her an Oscar nom, I liked it); Passengers....hey, that's not a string of failures.

Ah, the vagaries of rising high and having folks trying to shoot you down...

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[–] swanstep (2715) 7 years ago

Reading about the F cinemascore grade that mother! got, it seems clear that not only is m! some sort of freak-out horror movie, it also does lots of deliberately audience-estranging stuff in the tradition of Brecht/Godard/von Trier beginning with not naming any of the characters: Jlaw's childless character is just 'mother', Javier Badem's husband character is just 'him', and so on. I'm not sure that mainstream audiences anywhere, let alone in the US, have *ever* responded enthusiastically to this anti-narrative strand in drama and art cinema.

This is all reminding me of a discussion I heard recently that compared Aronofsky and Nolan. They broke through at about the same time and after Requiem Aronofksy was signed on to revive Batman but he ended up blowing that off to make his great passion sci-fi project, The Fountain, starring his then fiance Rachel Weisz. Nolan picks up the Batman project and postpones *his* great passion sci-fi project, Inception, until he's built up a lot of credit with Hollywood for that and can get Inception the budget he thinks it needs. The point of the discussion was then how Nolan had played things exactly right and Aronofsky by jumping too quickly for his passion project had messed up his career a bit.

*Now* it sounds like maybe Aronofsky, having built up some credit from The Wrestler and Black Swan and even Noah (which was a decent hit and I kinda liked it) has again gone off the deep end in a way that Nolan hasn't. Nolan's doing some interesting arty things with structure these days but he's *not* setting out to really get his audience's goat. I suspect Nolan *will* eventually go 'too arty' and cost Warner Bros some serious money, but right now he's still the careerist, studio banker's friend. *If* mother! turns out on reflection to be some sort of breakthrough film that everyone eventually has to see - which is how things worked for Requiem - then Aronofsky's daring may be vindicated, but prima facie Nolan wins again.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 7 years ago

mother! opening poorly (less than $10 mill?) is a bit of a surprise. I would have guessed that JLaw + Aronofsky's arty/extreme (Pi, Requiem, The Fountain, Black Swan - movies as-a-kind-of-drug) style *would* drag in more than enough teens etc. to do a bit better than that. And horror in general is having a good run these last few years so people *should* be up for something in a broadly Rosemary's Baby/Stepford Wives vein if it's sold well. And JLaw's done her bit by appearing on all sorts of talk-shows this week... I gather there are big spoiler-twists that can never be discussed so perhaps that's the deep problem with the publicity - you literally can't tell or show what the movie's really about.

I would say that something about the trailers and other advertizing has felt a little off to me... both coy and uninviting.... Oh well, I'll see it.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

I suspect J-Law knows exactly what she is doing, here.

The Hunger Games made her plenty rich, and at a very young age. But her Best Actress Oscar established the kind of credibility that compels her to "work with the interesting filmmakers," and Aronofsky is such a one. J-Law probably figures she can afford some box office drop-off in exchange for making films with the comparatively few auteurs who are out there.

I've read more about "mother!"(small "m") and its pretty clear its a very allegorical film with Biblical references and a Deep Think approach. I doubt that J-Law or her handlers saw this as a commercial film. It will make money over the years on cable, etc.

I suppose I have selected it out because the arrival and maintenance of J-Law as our biggest female star of the past 10 years is something worth watching. We've seen J-Law's stardom "from the beginning" and now we are watching as she dodges the slings and arrows of a gossip industry out to bring her down. She's under right wing political attack, too, but I've always felt that modernly, no movie HAS to have conservative viewers to make a profit; J-Law and Clooney and others simply needn't fear their opinions mattering on box office. No, if "mother!" has flopped, its because of the subject matter, not J-Law's politics. And Clooney's "Suburbicon" -- directed by him(he can't get acting work right now) -- looks to bomb because its a terrible movie. I've read. Oh, well, Clooney just made $150 million off his tequila company. He don't care.

Now: "Kingsmen 2" next week. It looks like a lot of fun, they lined up a lot of stars for it(Julianne Moore is the ULTRA-VILLAIN; I think that's funny; Jeff Bridges and Channing Tatum are good additives) and, like the first one, it is rated R, which means, like the R-rated first one, it may just go Gonzo ultra-violent and wreck the usual action fantasy movie model. Again.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 7 years ago

Paramount tries to "sell the controversy":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGyh1tjcARI
We want big studios to take the odd chance on nutso, star-director passion-projects like mother!, so I say good for them.

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[–] movieghoul (213) 7 years ago

Is it a spoiler if a poster guesses something about a film?

Haven't seen it or spoken to anyone who has and the reviews are very coy about what the allegory is, but it sure seems to be take on the New Testament.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

We want big studios to take the odd chance on nutso, star-director passion-projects like mother!, so I say good for them

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The tide is turning on "mother!" in terms of how to properly view it.

I rather like the "ji-jitsu" of the studio saying -- "You folks say all we make are comic book hero movies, well here we do something different and you reject it and don't help it earn its money back."

And clearly, J-Law is standing by her decision to "work with the best out there, even if they are art film makers." Word is, btw, that J-Law and the director are now "an item." How long that lasts in quicksilver romance Hollywood, remains to be seen.

It remains odd to me that Paramount didn't take this film exclusively to the art theaters. It might have only made $500,000 its first week at, say, ten theaters, but that would have been fine for a limited release -- the "political" attack on J-Law is that the $8 million first week gross is her lowest yet. Well, $8 million is actually a rather high gross for an art film, isn't it? Is J-Law WHY it grossed so high?

(My/yours/our analysis of all this reminds me why that phrase exists: "Everybody's second business is the movie business." Trying to think through what's going on here with "mother!" is part of the how the movie BUSINESS brings enjoyment to the fan/buff.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

But there are other variables to think about:

Paramount's argument that they backed an arty film and why didn't we come is a bit disingenuous.

To veer from the comic book movie to the near-incomprensible "anti-entertainment" of an allegorical art film isn't really the choice I think folks want.

They want more good NARRATIVE films -- you know, like Hitchcock and Wyler and Ford used to make. Or Norman Jewison. Or Sydney Pollack. Or Mark Rydell. I keep thinking of all the rejected scripts and good novels that aren't being greenlit in Hollywood right now. "mother!" has a big star attached and that likely got it made.

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Another thought:

ANOTHER movie that should have gotten the art film theater treatment: Van Sant's Psycho. Yep. By sending it out as "just another slasher horror movie" in wide release, Van Sant's take on an old horror movie without that much horror ,didn't sell. But had it gone to the art circuit and been sold as "an experiment in film re-creation," maybe a lower gross but a different analysis and far more respect.

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And this. A Rex Reed review calling "mother" the worst film of the CENTURY is in circulation as further ha-ha-ha proof that J-Law really blew it this time. And yet, with all due respect, Rex Reed must be 100 years old now, and even "back in the day" he was a "hatchetman reviewer" whose insulting critiques of movies he didn't like were meant to be shock and camp at the same time.

As too young a lad, I read Rex Reed's scathing destruction of Alfred Hitchcock's Topaz, and it hurt my feelings. I read the review a number of years later and thought --- "OK, Topaz wasn't that great, but this review is stupid, this guy doesn't know what he is talking about."

Rex Reed also wrote a scathing review recently of "Logan Lucky" that didn't fit the movie I saw at all. Reed's main take in the review is that Soderbergh is overrated, awful, never was good, etc. I wouldn't go that far but I must admit I don't think the Soderbergh career is filled with great works. Traffic and Erin Brockovich seemed rather pedestrian to me(except for Bencio Del Toro in Traffic); the Ocean's films are star-studded but a bit lightweight -- nothing really MATTERS. Magic Mike is exploitational. sex, lies and videotape is ...a long time ago.

Back in the day, Robert Altman had a rule about Rex Reed. No free screenings of an Altman film for Reed -- he had to pay.

And who can forget Reed's great performance in "Myra Breckinridge"(now THERE's a movie; THERE's a book! Ah, 1970.)

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[–] swanstep (2715) 7 years ago

It remains odd to me that Paramount didn't take this film exclusively to the art theaters. It might have only made $500,000 its first week at, say, ten theaters, but that would have been fine for a limited release -- the "political" attack on J-Law is that the $8 million first week gross is her lowest yet. Well, $8 million is actually a rather high gross for an art film, isn't it? Is J-Law WHY it grossed so high?

I checked and mother! went out on 2368 screens in the US. That *was* incredibly optimistic!

I checked for comparison what happened with Punch-drunk Love (2002). It was a pretty radical arty film that nonetheless got to play all over the country thanks to its big-star-at-the-time, Adam Sandler. Checking, its widest release was to 1293 screens but it too a month to build up to that. It was on 5 screens for its first week, 78 for its second, 481 for its third week, and so on. In its first weekend of very wide (>1200 screens) release it made about $4 million (about half of what mother! made), and it grossed about $18 million in its entire first run. I'd say mother! is a dead cert to at least make more than $20 million (domestically)

And let's consider the (domestic) grosses of relatively critically acclaimed, relatively artsy horrors of recent years:
The Witch: $25 million
It Follows: $14 million
The Babadook: $1 million
Raw: $500K
A Ghost Story: $1.5 million
Beyond the Black Rainbow: $50K
High Tension: $3.6 million
Compare with this year's somewhat less arty, super-profitable horror hits:
Get Out: $175 million
Split: $138 million
It: $223 million (so far)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

I checked and mother! went out on 2368 screens in the US. That *was* incredibly optimistic!

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I suppose..assuming the cost of prints to so many screens isn't an issue(is it? digital and all, plus one print on many screens in one theater)...that was a "safe" way of grabbing a lot of cash before reviews revealed the incomprehensible nature of the film. I mean, about all they could do was advertise it as a horror thriller, which I understand, it isn't.

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I checked for comparison what happened with Punch-drunk Love (2002). It was a pretty radical arty film that nonetheless got to play all over the country thanks to its big-star-at-the-time, Adam Sandler.

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Weirdly, he's STILL kind of big. He's cleaning up with Netflix flicks, I understand.

I saw that film; the reviews were good, I thought it was OK. His stuff with Phillip Seymour Hoffman was weird but great anger-driven stuff.

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Checking, its widest release was to 1293 screens but it too a month to build up to that. It was on 5 screens for its first week, 78 for its second, 481 for its third

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See? This is how you'd think mother should have been released.

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In its first weekend of very wide (>1200 screens) release it made about $4 million (about half of what mother! made),

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With cheaper tickets then, maybe closer to ..$ 6 million now?

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and it grossed about $18 million in its entire first run. I'd say mother! is a dead cert to at least make more than $20 million (domestically)

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Yes. I expect they will keep it around, and who knows -- a flood of "wait a minute, its GOOD" word of mouth reviews may bring it up a notch in earnings. Or slow its descent.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

And let's consider the (domestic) grosses of relatively critically acclaimed, relatively artsy horrors of recent years:
The Witch: $25 million
It Follows: $14 million
The Babadook: $1 million
Raw: $500K
A Ghost Story: $1.5 million
Beyond the Black Rainbow: $50K
High Tension: $3.6 million

Well, obviously mother! is in fine company for making the kind of profits it is meant to make(unless it gets some Oscar consideration.)

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Compare with this year's somewhat less arty, super-profitable horror hits:
Get Out: $175 million
Split: $138 million
It: $223 million (so far)

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And here, we have the issue that mother!(despite the Psycho-ish title, hah) isn't much of a horror movie.

I suppose another issue -- that could prove false -- is that J-Law is supposed to be some sort of superstar. But that's only from The Hunger Games, and that wasn't "her." Interestingly, that franchise is rather played out even as Robert Downey Jr. has kept Iron Man going since 2008 and Johnny Depp got 14 years (with long gaps) out of Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

J-Law's next few years will show her needing to prove herself as a movie star...but only somewhat. As someone recently wrote, "the concept of the movie star is rather dead." Movie stars don't drive ticket sales; the story does.

And if she's serious about taking 2 years off(though I think she's got two films coming first), J-Law can pretty much relax about the whole star thing. She's got a name, she can always come back and do SOMETHING. The pay's the thing.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 7 years ago

And here, we have the issue that mother!(despite the Psycho-ish title, hah) isn't much of a horror movie.

Oh, I dunno, it sounds like mother! has plenty in it that's horrifying/upsetting.... but the change in tone when it blasts off into some completely unrealistic, allegorical mode in its final third is just *not* in a lot of mainstream viewers wheelhouses.

There have been some good articles on the (only 19 film-strong!) history of F cinemascores in the last week, which make the case very strongly that it's 'being artsily genre-bending or weird' that explains cinemagoers ire in at least half the cases:

F's include Soderbergh's Solaris (artsy, slow - if not compared to the Russian version! - sci-fi), Dominik's Killing Them Softy (talky, slow gangster-flick), Friedkin's Bug (unclassifiable freak out film), Campion's In The Cut (odd, downbeat anti-erotic thriller), and so on. All of these films are worth seeing and some, e.g., Bug, are near-great in my view. In all these cases, I'd say that anyone who saw these movies as fans of the director in question wouldn't regard any of these movies as a waste of their time. mother! seems to fit right into that: an Aronofsky fan may not like mother! but they should be able to agree they went on a somewhat characteristic directorial trip. It's only your naive JLaw and horror fans that are going to be outraged.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

F's include Soderbergh's Solaris (artsy, slow - if not compared to the Russian version! - sci-fi),

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This one is one of George Clooney's long, long long list of films that the public did not see but that Clooney had faith in making. I expect that Clooney's having made three Oceans hits with Soderbergh gave both men the license to "make some art," too.

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Dominik's Killing Them Softy (talky, slow gangster-flick),

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I actually saw this one, on the basis of Brad Pitt, James Gandolfini and the actor who played "Johnny Sack" on The Sopranos with Gandolfini. It was very slow and very brutal and a bit arty. Gandolfini gave us a horrific vision of a burnt-out Mafia hit man who can't do the work anymore(Gandolfini's weight gain was much in evidence; he died not too many years later). Bottom line: I liked this, bleak as it was.

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Friedkin's Bug (unclassifiable freak out film), Campion's In The Cut (odd, downbeat anti-erotic thriller), and so on. All of these films are worth seeing and some, e.g., Bug, are near-great in my view.

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I gotta see that Bug.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

In all these cases, I'd say that anyone who saw these movies as fans of the director in question wouldn't regard any of these movies as a waste of their time. mother! seems to fit right into that: an Aronofsky fan may not like mother! but they should be able to agree they went on a somewhat characteristic directorial trip. It's only your naive JLaw and horror fans that are going to be outraged.

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Well, we here confront the whole issue of the "mainstream film" versus the "art film." Words like "elite" and "the masses" come into play, but I've never quite bought into that. I generally know when I'm seeing an art film --- the plot may be incomprehensible, the acting and writing stylized, and ultimately "entertainment" is the last thing on the mind of the art film maker. Its art.

When an art film is released into the thousands of US multiplexes with no real warning or guidance, well...you get one of those "Fs" automatically, it seems to me. The mass audience simply can't relate and feels insulted(they paid hard-earned MONEY to see this, and it is "anti-entertainment.".) Art films are especially aggravating when a mainstream star fronts them(Pitt, J-Law.) Its possible that Clooney is more of an art film actor than a commercial movie star.

I don't relate to well to art films. Perhaps that makes me unintelligent, but I think it just means I don't have the "gene of appreciation" for an art film, any more than I have the "gene of appreciation" for art in the gallery. Its a rarefied sub-stratum of society that is attracted to art.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 7 years ago

I generally know when I'm seeing an art film --- the plot may be incomprehensible, the acting and writing stylized, and ultimately "entertainment" is the last thing on the mind of the art film maker. It's art.

That's an interesting way of looking at it. Given that films are normally very difficult and expensive to make, they're normally made with a laser-like focus on 'not scaring the horses' and on giving people almost exactly what they've shown they're willing to pay for many times before (i.e., in the hopes that they'll do so again leading to profits!). Art-film or degree-of-artiness is then identified and defined by how far the film-makers risk 'scaring the horses', how many things they try that an audience may not have seen before, may not quite know how to parse and understand, may cause walk-outs or money-backs, etc..

Thinking in this way, it's only big-budget art-films that are a problem. If your arty film with a (working for scale or close to it) big star and director only costs $1-2 million then risks of loss are very low. Apparently mother! cost about $35 million - about the same as All That Jazz cost in 1979 when you adjust for inflation - so it needs to gross at least $70 million worldwide to cover costs (maybe $80-90 million if the majority of the gross is outside North America). It doesn't look like it's going to do anywhere near that, and Paramount had to know that that was a risk. It does strike me that that's what we want big studios to do: take risks on a couple of slightly more experimental films with significant budgets each year. Film would be poorer without your Vertigo's and All That Jazz's and Day of The Locust's and The Shining's and Zabriskie Point's.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

I generally know when I'm seeing an art film --- the plot may be incomprehensible, the acting and writing stylized, and ultimately "entertainment" is the last thing on the mind of the art film maker. It's art.

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That's an interesting way of looking at it. Given that films are normally very difficult and expensive to make, they're normally made with a laser-like focus on 'not scaring the horses' and on giving people almost exactly what they've shown they're willing to pay for many times before (i.e., in the hopes that they'll do so again leading to profits!).

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And this formula has worsened over the years, because now they're looking to make something that the people of ALL CONTINENTS can like at the same time.

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Art-film or degree-of-artiness is then identified and defined by how far the film-makers risk 'scaring the horses', how many things they try that an audience may not have seen before, may not quite know how to parse and understand, may cause walk-outs or money-backs, etc..

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I think so. And true art film directors rather proudly know this is what they are doing. I'd say that David Lynch is the most notable example -- except that his "Twin Peaks" projects seem to have drawn a "mainstream" following."

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

I like to offer this example of a successful mainstream art film -- a Best Picture winner yet -- but only because, frankly, it MISLED audiences as to what it really was . It was also entertaining along the way, which is why its not quite a full art film.

I am thinking of "No Country for Old Men" which tells the "Charley Varrick" story but with none of the earlier film's penchant for " a satisfying climax that wraps things up."

SPOILERS

In No Country for Old Men, we spend the movie waiting for a showdown between the Evil Hitman (Bardem, who was Joe Don Baker in Varrick) and Josh Brolin(who was Matthau's Charley Varrick in...Charley Varrick.) I mean, Brolin even threatens Bardem with a showdown over the phone.

But that showdown never arrives. Brolin is killed way before it can happen...and the discovery of his body is anti-climactic. As for the evil Bardem, he pretty much just walks away from the movie, injured but intact. We are left with a final scene of Art, as sheriff Tommy Lee Jones(ineffectual, defeated, didn't matter to the story at all) tells us about a dream he had. The End.

Still, along the way, No Country had enough intriguing scenes(like Bardem's big coin toss speech) to fake us out: we THOUGHT it was a mainstream thriller...

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Thinking in this way, it's only big-budget art-films that are a problem. If your arty film with a (working for scale or close to it) big star and director only costs $1-2 million then risks of loss are very low. Apparently mother! cost about $35 million - about the same as All That Jazz cost in 1979 when you adjust for inflation - so it needs to gross at least $70 million worldwide to cover costs (maybe $80-90 million if the majority of the gross is outside North America).

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You mention All That Jazz, which was arty, but not an art film, to me. But I think I get the connection. And by the way, All That Jazz features fictionalized versions of the the real life Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon...who together powered "Damn Yankees" 19 years earlier than All that Jazz in 1979. Everything connects!

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It doesn't look like it's going to do anywhere near that, and Paramount had to know that that was a risk. It does strike me that that's what we want big studios to do: take risks on a couple of slightly more experimental films with significant budgets each year. Film would be poorer without your Vertigo's and All That Jazz's and Day of The Locust's and The Shining's and Zabriskie Point's.

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I agree. I expect that every studio has budgeted for some risk, some loss, to meet overall goals. Oscar noms and wins often bring in more bucks, and sometimes the deal is made with the STAR(perhaps Paramount is guaranteed J-Law in two mainstream movies in exchange for backing this one.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Zabriskie Point was a famous case of a struggling mainstream US studio(MGM) bringing over an art director, the director of "Blow Up"(and more obscure art films) to do one in the US. Rather as with 2001, MGM rolled the dice. It was a failure, but we have it and we can value its historical significance today. (And its got ROD TAYLOR in it.)

I think I"ve mentioned I actually got to go on THE major set of Day of the Locust. The mockup of the façade of Graumann's Chinese Theater and Hollywood. I believe I was on the Rear Window soundstage at Paramount. I watched Jackie Earle Haley throw a rubber brick at Donald Sutherland's forehead, which bled. Then Sutherland stomped a Jackie Earle Haley dummy to death. They filmed the riot later.

The Shining and Vertigo really ARE art house versions of the horror movie and the thriller, aren't they. I don't think anybody figured that out about Vertigo -- I mean it starred Jimmy and Kim.

As for The Shining, I remember LA Times critic Kevin Thomas's concern: "This is a horror movie that won't satisfy art film lovers, and an art film that won't satisfy horror lovers."

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[–] swanstep (2715) 7 years ago

You mention All That Jazz, which was arty, but not an art film, to me. But I think I get the connection.

ATJ does have its crowd-pleasing moments but it also has plenty of stuff in it from a complicated flashback structure together with a parallel, metaphorical commentary level of reality (with Scheider and Jesscia Lange) to closeup open heart surgery that drove mainstream audiences up the wall. Seeing it (twice) in High School was formative for me: I was thinking all the way through that it was easily one of the greatest films I'd ever seen, meanwhile at least 20% of the audience walked out before the end including one fellow who yelled loudly while exiting, 'What is this ****?'

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[–] swanstep (2715) 7 years ago

BTW, back in 2010 The Guardian did a series of '25 best all-time film lists' largely following genre boundaries where they had one category as "Arthouse" or sometimes "Arthouse and Drama". Here's a link to the basic data:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/oct/16/greatest-films-of-all-time
And here's that top-25 separately:

1) Andrei Rublev
2) Mulholland Drive
3) L'Atalante
4) Toyko Story
5) Citizen Kane
6) A Clockwork Orange
7) Days of Heaven
8) Fanny and Alexander
9) The White Ribbon
10) The Gospel According to Saint Matthew
11) Aguirre, Wrath of God
12) Pather Panchali
13) The Conformist
14) Death in Venice
15) The Godfather
16) The Graduate
17) There Will Be Blood
18) Battleship Potemkin
19) The Rules of the Game
20) Shadows
21) Distant Voices, Still Lives
22) The Passion of Joan of Arc
23) La Dolce Vita
24) Breaking the Waves
25) The Spirit of the Beehive

I think it's clear that this list combines two quite different sorts of films - super-pleasurable and super-well-made, not-especially-experimental/rule-breaking films on the one hand (Godfather, Graduate, Rules of the Game, Tokyo Story, Days of Heaven, Spirit of the Beehive) with self-consciously much more extreme films that literally wouldn't be out of place exhibited in an art museum and that it's actually some kind of miracle they were ever made or ever found an audience (Passion of Joan of Arc, Andrei Rublev, Mulholland Dr, Clockwork Orange, Breaking the Waves, and so on), as well as a few genuinely intermediate cases (Citizen Kane, There Will Be Blood, The Conformist, Fanny and Alexander, White Ribbon). I'm also puzzled that things like The Godfather get to appear on this list notwithstanding its gangster/crime base genre whereas the, to-my-eyes, much *more* art-film-ish 2001 *doesn't* get to escape *its* underlying sci-fi genre.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Is it a spoiler if a poster guesses something about a film?

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Is that the one with the human heart?

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Haven't seen it or spoken to anyone who has and the reviews are very coy about what the allegory is, but it sure seems to be take on the New Testament.

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I think you are right. The director's making of "Noah" evidently set the stage for this film.

Of all his films, I gotta admit, The Wrestler (among his works I've seen) looks oddly "normal" and out of step with the rest of the director's work (Black Swan, Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain.)

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[–] swanstep (2715) 7 years ago

Well, it sounds like Blade Runner 2049 is pretty jolly great.... but it has even more of a slow, atmospheric, art-film vibe than the original, which is catnip to critics, but for general audiences? While it won't attack audience the way mother! evidently did, Blade Runner 2049 is still going to be a test of how much support a big-budget but definitely arty film can get.

Blade Runner (1982) lost a little bit of money on original release but soon went into the black on video, etc.. I suspect that BR 2049 is going to do quite well, but it's cost a *ton* of money, reportedly close to $200 million. That's the norm for big, kid-friendly, superhero movies but is, e.g., twice what Dunkirk cost.

Dunkirk's ended up making a little over $500 million worldwide (Mad Max Fury Road made about $400 million). BR 2049 will lose money if it does the same business as MM-FR and needs to do as well as Dunkirk to break even. That's quite a high hurdle for a moody/arty film to clear. Fingers crossed.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Well, it sounds like Blade Runner 2049 is pretty jolly great.... but it has even more of a slow, atmospheric, art-film vibe than the original, which is catnip to critics, but for general audiences? While it won't attack audience the way mother! evidently did, Blade Runner 2049 is still going to be a test of how much support a big-budget but definitely arty film can get.

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An interesting thought. Certainly, the fall is when the movies get "serious" after the superhero summer(well until November/December and the Xmas corridor superheroes), but perhaps this year, things are getting downright "mainstream arty."

I would say that J-Law's gamble with "mother!" is paying off, btw. Low grosses and F scores aside, it IS being taken seriously as an art film(by many critics) and seems to be "sticking around" as a conversation piece movie for a small group of people to embrace. J-Law emerges looking more "prestige" than ever and -- she's playing a supersexy spy in Red Sparrow next, anyway.

Blade Runner (1982) lost a little bit of money on original release but soon went into the black on video, etc.. I suspect that BR 2049 is going to do quite well, but it's cost a *ton* of money, reportedly close to $200 million. That's the norm for big, kid-friendly, superhero movies but is, e.g., twice what Dunkirk cost.

Dunkirk's ended up making a little over $500 million worldwide (Mad Max Fury Road made about $400 million). BR 2049 will lose money if it does the same business as MM-FR and needs to do as well as Dunkirk to break even. That's quite a high hurdle for a moody/arty film to clear. Fingers crossed.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Blade Runner (1982) lost a little bit of money on original release but soon went into the black on video, etc..

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I am a bit ambivalent about Harrison Ford's return in the new Blade Runner.

Because he also returned in a new Star Wars.

And before that, he returned in a new Indiana Jones.

And in the previous two cases -- it really felt like "Ford couldn't go home again." Oh, he made zillion dollars(especially on his Star Wars return) but...these did not feel like "classics" like their forbears.

And now he is doing it with Blade Runner.

I'm reminded that, as opposed to Paul Newman or Steve McQueen or Robert Redford, Harrison Ford was mainly a "franchise star" carried by Star Wars and Indy Jones (six movies in all before the later sequels) for over a decade. To the extent he got a few solid hits outside of those Big Two...Blade Runner has the highest reputation, and The Fugitive has the highest gross. Then I think you throw in Witness (didn't Ford get an Oscar nom for that?) and two Jack Ryan movies( a franchise launched with Alec Baldwin and continued with Ben Affleck and one of those Chris guys) and Air Force One and...that's it. (Oh, I'm sure I'm forgetting something, but Ford was actually out in the wilderness for a long time, movie hit wise.)

I'm also a bit saddened to see Ford looking so OLD as Han Solo in Star Wars, and in this new Blade Runner. He was a handsome young man, a more handsome early middle-aged man, but now, that face is 100 miles of bad road. But they have matched him with young "stars" who don't match Ford's stardom when HE was young. Shia LaBoef in the new Indy. Unknowns in Star Wars. Ryan Gosling is a big deal in Blade Runner or wait....is it Ryan Reynolds? Would it matter?(Actually, yes. Gosling has more cool; Reynolds is more a wiseass pretty face.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

As a personal matter, I expect by now I've revealed that personally I'm not much of a SciFi guy, nor really much into the GOT vibe. Its my problem --- I'm rather locked into Hitchcock, Don Siegel(Dirty Harry , Charley Varrick) and some individual great thrillers(The Manchurian Candidate, Charade, Wait Until Dark.) That's MY bread and butter, and it reveals a certain "dull and grounded" taste in my movies.

Still, I can UNDERSTAND the cult status of Blade Runner and what the whole 'replicant" angle means in both thematic and "thriller terms." This became a trendy term of art(along with "clone") that has travelled the decades.

You know what I didn't much like in Blade Runner? Harrison Ford's buzz cut hair. He wore that again in Presumed Innocent, and I don't much think the look becomes him.

You know what I DID like in Blade Runner? The incredible LOOK of that city (Seoul and Tokyo look a lot like that now, from footage I've seen), and I liked it being couched in "private eye terms." Decker's a cop, but he feels more like Bogart.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

I suspect that BR 2049 is going to do quite well, but it's cost a *ton* of money, reportedly close to $200 million. That's the norm for big, kid-friendly, superhero movies but is, e.g., twice what Dunkirk cost.

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Twice? Well, Dunkirk feels awfully Spartan.

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Dunkirk's ended up making a little over $500 million worldwide (Mad Max Fury Road made about $400 million).

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Wow. Better than Mad Max? Well, I think there was a summer hunger for something historical and meaty. I liked Dunkirk even if its approach was rather small scale and near-silent.

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BR 2049 will lose money if it does the same business as MM-FR and needs to do as well as Dunkirk to break even. That's quite a high hurdle for a moody/arty film to clear. Fingers crossed.

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Well, I dunno. It seems modernly, any movie that is MADE makes money eventually. Its just a matter of whether or not it shows blockbuster business early , instead of taking years to earn back costs and make a profit.

The first two weekends will tell the tale on BR 2049...worldwide grosses included, of course.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 7 years ago

Another couple of problems for BR 2049 making the bank it needs: it's 2 hrs 44m long and it's rated R. God bless Warner Brothers for allowing this sort of creative freedom with such a big budget. As you say, the first couple of weekends (worldwide, same day release this Thursday I believe) will tell the story as to whether BR 2049 is at least going to get close to profitability or not.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 7 years ago

Gosling, Leto, Ford are doing their best to sell this movie! Together with the embargo on reviews being lifted a few days early once it was clear they'd be terrfic, there's a full-court press on the media for BR 2049 right now.

Gosling on SNL's premiere was just OK I thought. Monologue about 'saving Jazz' dragged a bit but did make me laugh with 'Nerlins' and 'Chica-gee' and 'NYC city'. Emma Stone showing up again reminded me that if I were Mrs Ryan Gosling I'd still be worried about her. Gosling cracks up way too much, but I guess I can accept it from him whereas Fallon as a permanent cast member with this problem just made me mad. Liked the Guy Who Just Bought a Yacht in Update and Gosling's part in it...and the Avatar Font sketch was appealingly deranged. The female side of the cast felt a little deflated without Vanessa Bayer to give crucial support in sketches. MacKinnon feels even more out on her own now.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Gosling on SNL's premiere was just OK I thought.

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And so an "SNL" thread creeps in(we got static about that over at you know where. But I don't think that will happen here. C'mon, like I say, "its where the movie stars come to play.")

I had placed a bet that Gal Gadot would host the opener. I'm off by a week. She's next week. They need to promote Blade Runner first.

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Monologue about 'saving Jazz' dragged a bit but did make me laugh with 'Nerlins' and 'Chica-gee' and 'NYC city'.

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His line delivery was funny: "I ...savedjazz!"

Emma Stone showing up again reminded me that if I were Mrs Ryan Gosling I'd still be worried about her.

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They've played lovers a time or two. Or two more...

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Gosling cracks up way too much,

--

Mainly in that "alien experience" skit that MacKinnon rules with comedy but I tell ya -- it seemed to me she was given almost the exact same lines and "visual butt gags" she got a year ago with this sketch. Gosling seems legit in his busting up...

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but I guess I can accept it from him whereas Fallon as a permanent cast member with this problem just made me mad.

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It seemed a permanent affectation with Fallon.

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Liked the Guy Who Just Bought a Yacht in Update and Gosling's part in it...and the Avatar Font sketch was appealingly deranged.

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Both funny. Agreed.

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The female side of the cast felt a little deflated without Vanessa Bayer to give crucial support in sketches. MacKinnon feels even more out on her own now.

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The talent base is low. I mean, Kennan Thompson is in, like, his 500th season. And he made a joke to that extent a full year ago when LAST season opened. And now here he is a year later. Bottom line: he's funny, and they seem desperate to keep him around.

As for the "white guys," they seem to split between good-looking and not so good looking. And they are desperate to break through.

I do like Cecily Strong's boozy "Cathy Anne" (last seen in a special summer Update episode.) That's funny vocal stuff.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

I heard Adam Sandler and Rob Scheider on Howard Stern the other day saying that Alec Baldwin's Trump impression and sketches are stealing valuable time from the younger performers to make their names. "C'mon," Sandler joked, "Baldwin's SIXTY. And he's rich. Give the kids some airtime."

Oh, they are getting airtime. But they aren't as funny as Baldwin's Trump.

For now. Said Baldwin, "You have to understand, we thought Hilary would win. I figured I'd play Trump for five weeks."

More like four years...it could get a bit old. Baldwin may well stop being the one who does it.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 7 years ago

The first two weekends will tell the tale on BR 2049...worldwide grosses included, of course.

Weekend 1 was $32.7 million domestic and around $50 million foreign. These are disappointing numbers given BR 2049's budget with the domestic audience strongly skewing older (80% over 25) and male (70%).

The good reviews and decent WOM ensure that it should hang around a while... but ultimately just as BR itself was too meditative and adult to pull big crowds in the summer of ET and Poltergeist and Road Warrior, it seems that BR 2049 is hitting the exact same catnip-for-critics-and-design-geeks-but-too-slow-and-mysterious-for-the-mainstream spot.

Here's hoping it manages some solid holds over the next few weeks... If audiences don;t get out and support something like this then they'll have voted themselves an all-giant-robot/superhero blockbuster future.

I checked and fan-driven, well-reviewed, big-budget Mad Max:Fury Road made about $45 million in its first weekend en route to about $150 million domestic (and it hit $100 million after 14 days). I calculated earlier that BR 2049 needed to do better than MM:FR to break even. Can it at least catch up to MM:FR? Maybe. MM-FR's box-office was very front loaded in its first four weeks, whereas maybe BR 2049 will hang around for months making decent money. We'll see.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

The good reviews and decent WOM ensure that it should hang around a while... but ultimately just as BR itself was too meditative and adult to pull big crowds in the summer of ET and Poltergeist and Road Warrior, it seems that BR 2049 is hitting the exact same catnip-for-critics-and-design-geeks-but-too-slow-and-mysterious-for-the-mainstream spot.

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Its interesting that, for all the decades since the release of the original, the problem remains the same...and the prognosis remains the same (likely a "cult" classic that will earn its money in ancillary broadcast markets.)

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Here's hoping it manages some solid holds over the next few weeks... If audiences don;t get out and support something like this then they'll have voted themselves an all-giant-robot/superhero blockbuster future.

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This is something to ponder. I suppose it boils down to this: you don't get a true blockbuster nowadays unless you can attract pre-teen kids and/or teenagers.

The "adult" market that manifests in the fall usually counts its hits -- Gone Girl, Moneyball, La La Land -- in lower amounts of gross income. A comic book movie needs to gross about $300 million domestic to be a blockbuster; a "fall hit" needs to gross about $150 miliion domestic to be a hit.

But BR 2049 looks to miss even those "fall hit" numbers (domestic) and given its summer blockbuster COST...that's trouble.

Still, it was worth the investment, to be sure. It will earn something for years to come.

And in some ways, BR 2049 was simply inevitable. Hollywood cannibalizes its own movies, now. They are working on 70s/80s movies(Alien, Blade Runner, I hear Top Gun II is coming); eventually they will reach the 90's. And when they reach the 2010s to remake...what CAN They remake?

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

I'm not sure we ever get back a movie business in which a lot of movies needed only to make a small profit to still be considered classic -- the kind of movie year where North by Northwest and Rio Bravo and Anatomy of a Murder and Pillow Talk and Imitation of Life were hits but not GIANT hits, and all classic entertainment. (Star driven, too.)

The times have changed.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Meanwhile, back at "Mother!"

Martin Scorsese has written an OpEd style piece in praise of the film...THAT should keep it in the film fan eye for awhile....

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[–] swanstep (2715) 7 years ago

Here's a link to the Scorsese article:
http://tinyurl.com/y9hyw695
It's actually in the first instance a general complaint piece about the influence of Cinemascore, RottenTomatoes, and other statistics-driven indices on movie-consumption and even -production. Scorsese does, however, go on to defend mother! as a movie that's clearly up to something and worth wrestling with and that has a shot at going on to become a classic nothwithstanding its initially rocky reception, a la Vertigo, It's A Wonderful Life, Night of the Hunter, etc..

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Thanks, swanstep.

Yes, he seems to be going after the scoring sites more than anything -- and using the treatment of mother! as Exhibit A as to how these sites do movie buffs a DISSERVICE.

It seems to me that any art film without a comprehensible story will get itself an "F." Which means art films have no business being rated there.

But there's another problem: the studio chose to release mother! WIDE to multiplexes with no real forewarning to J-Law fans or casual moviegoers. They aren't the audience for art films, so what can be expected? (I expect a "pure art" crowd would give an "F" to The Avengers.)

Martin Scorsese is in a fine position to comment on all of this, to be a mouthpiece for all of us who would like to comment on how "the movies have changed." Interesting: Marty just made an art movie himself -- "Silence" -- and to make up for it(dream project though it was), it looks like he's making the "all star king of the gangster movie" next: The Irishman, with DeNiro and Pacino and Pesci and Keitel and Liotta.

Like Hitchcock (who followed Strangers on a Train with I Confess and Vertigo with North by Northwest), Marty knows how to "mix and match" the hits with the art films.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 7 years ago

Have at last caught up with Mother! (2017)... and it's definitely worth at least seeing once. The big creative choice that M! makes is to set itself up as a fable, as a kind of an alternative Genesis myth (which, remember, covers not just creation and the growth of a sinful civilization which God destroys - the Flood - but also the development from Noah down to Abraham of a 'chosen people' who are again riddled with sin, and partially as a result end the book enslaved in Egypt). Despite a few feints in the other direction we're never really inclined to think that any of the characters in M! are real people. Unfortunately this decision undermines the horror the film also wants to traffic in. JLaw's character does occasionally feel like a sister to Wendy in The Shining and also to Rosemary in Rosemary's Baby, but it's impossible to care too much in this case because JLaw's char. is first and foremost a symbol or allegorical place-holder. If *she* suffers some indignity then that's just the working out of a thesis, not anything to be perturbed by.

Precisely because of the kind of flatness that can otherwise result, most movies with symbolic ambitions first anchor us in several layers of character and plot before finally revealing or at least hinting at the grand design buried beneath. M!, however, jumps into symbolism feet-first from the beginning much as, say, Cocteau's Orpheus (1950) does. Cocteau's film succeeds because it's so playful and aware of the ridiculousness of a Greek Myth brought to life. Aronofsky's film fails I think because it's so ernest and both steers into its own allegorical flatness at the same time as it seems to expect us to be horrified at JLaw's (never-named) character's plight as if she's an actual torture-victim from some French extreme-horror (Martyrs, Noe's films, and also things like von Trier's Anti-Christ are important points of reference for M! perhaps reflecting M!'s conceptual/tonal confusion).

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[–] swanstep (2715) 7 years ago

Anyhow, because M! is all-symbolism all-the-time it's *really* out of step with mainstream audiences, even mainstream horror audiences. And, as I've tried to explain, M!'s execution seems a bit confused so that it doesn't quite find a consistent level that allows more sophisticated viewers to enjoy it. I'm actually kind of open to hearing an alternative Old Testament - perhaps it's Genesis if it were written *yesterday* to explain and maybe justify all the horrors of the modern, violent, over-crowded, planet-strangling world (I'd need to see it again, which I'm in no hurry to do, to be sure) - but I still found M! a bit of a chore to get through. You're giving up such a lot by going purely symbolic. You'd better be as smart and interesting as Cocteau or Lynch to pull it off. In a way I think that Aronofsky did have some good ideas here but it's as if he didn't know how to make the sort of 'film of ideas' that he really wanted to make and so settled for grafting his new big ideas onto the sort of 'first-personal plunge into nightmare' film that he's made many times before. M! does *not* work but it's kind of a fascinating failure.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

You're giving up such a lot by going purely symbolic. You'd better be as smart and interesting as Cocteau or Lynch to pull it off.

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Thanks for the interesting take on "Mother." I forgot to mention J-Law as a possible Oscar nominee for this; she's won one and been nominated a time or two more, she could be "Little Miss Streep," right now. J-Law's bet on this film looks more right all the time, as does the crackpot idea of releasing it nationwide (to an 8 million opening) rather than only in a few art houses(it made more money going wide and the "flop" idea has long left it -- it was successful for an art film.)

But I like the idea that too OVERTLY symbolic a movie can lose the human element of interest.

Take Psycho, for instance.

I've read of quite a few symbolic things in that film. Hitchcock said the stuffed birds were symbolic as "watcher's of Norman's guilt." And it has been said that the murky swamp is a toilet into which Norman flushes the feces of Marion's car.

But the symbolism is background in Psycho, not foreground.

Mother seems to be going all the way and adding not just a Biblical text, but a "made up" Biblical text.

Again, I have to claim a personal lack of the genetic makeup to enjoy the "art film." I need some narrative. I need some real characters.

But I just might rent Mother.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 7 years ago

But I like the idea that too OVERTLY symbolic a movie can lose the human element of interest.

I've been thinking quite a lot about related issues lately. Nolan's films aren't overtly symbolic but they often do reflect a series of very attention-grabbing directorial choices (e.g., in Dunkirk to (i) never show or even name the Germans, (ii) to make all the British soldiers almost identical looking and sounding and unnamed, (iii) to cut between 3 different time-lines (iv) to have Branagh's character regularly exposition dump etc.), and I end up standoff-ishly thinking over those choices rather more than I do just feel myself *in* the movie. The upshot: all that Imax camera-work and those great practical water and fire fx, and powerful sound designs are almost wasted because the large directorial choices have otherwise hollowed out the experience for us.

Nolan's brother Jonathan has a big-budget show, Westworld, on HBO which I'm only half way through... and some of the same problems apply and already I'm finding the directorial/narrative heavy hand draining away my interest. (WW also has the same problem that the Jurassic Park films have as a franchise - how to get more than 2 or 3 hours out of 'amusement park attractions go wild, start killing the guests'. 5 films already seems ludicrous, but WW plans to get 40+ hours of TV out of the same premise!)

Big moral: you'd better be really smart and have something *really* important to say if you intend to seriously downgrade character and plot and dialogue and instead prioritize various sorts of directorial/authorial intention.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 7 years ago

It's worth mentioning that heavily, even near exclusively symbolic films were more on people's radar in the '60s and '70s than they are now. You don't watch Bunuel's Simon of the Desert or Phantom of Liberty or Godard's 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her or Weekend or Pasolini's Teorema or Salo looking for believable characters or plot. In the English-speaking world this abstract/experimental/idea-heavy mode that was in the air at the time seemed to go down best twisted into absurdist comedy. How I Won The War, Candy, The Bed-sitting Room, Little Murders, If..., O Lucky Man, The Telephone Book, President's Analyst, even things like Tommy were all greeted as weird but also had some success. Highly symbolic stuff played completely straight in English, however, tended to fail big time and be barely seen: Herostratus, The Magus, Zabriskie Point, Last Movie, Ludwig, The Other Side of Underneath, and so on.

Mother! doesn't quite work I think, but audiences responses, my own included, to the *type* of film M! is are also a little rusty in my view.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

I've been thinking quite a lot about related issues lately. Nolan's films aren't overtly symbolic but they often do reflect a series of very attention-grabbing directorial choices (e.g., in Dunkirk to (i) never show or even name the Germans, (ii) to make all the British soldiers almost identical looking and sounding and unnamed, (iii) to cut between 3 different time-lines (iv) to have Branagh's character regularly exposition dump etc.), and I end up standoff-ishly thinking over those choices rather more than I do just feel myself *in* the movie. The upshot: all that Imax camera-work and those great practical water and fire fx, and powerful sound designs are almost wasted because the large directorial choices have otherwise hollowed out the experience for us.

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And the main directorial choice that makes the audience "keep leaving the movie" is the three timelines. Its rather an arbitrary "mind-bender" device that I don't think much helps tell the story -- it tells the device. (And it comes from Nolan, who got his first breakthrough with the famous Memento -- the movie that tells its story backwards "just because.")

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

I was watching much of The Dark Knight the other Knight(ha) and noted that Nolan elected, much of the time, to keep cross-cutting from one scene in one location to another scene in another location, and in certain ways it didn't work. For instance, the Joker's first big dialogue scene with a bunch of mobsters is intercut -- for awhile -- with Commissioner Gordon(or whatever rank he is at that time) running a raid to retrieve money that has been "taken from the mob." We are so focussed on the Joker that the Gordon scene intercut with it "gets in the way" - the brain rejects it in favor of the Joker.

Says I.

But wait: Around the same time, I watched my 1974 guilty pleasure "The Towering Inferno" and -- adjacent to my watching of The Dark Knight -- noted that the movie used the SAME TECHNIQUE. Just more slowly. To wit: a memorable scene in The Towering Inferno shows suave skyscraper PR man Robert Wagner post-tryst with his secretary , hidden away in a private room in the skyscraper with the phones turned off(pre cell phone era; boy did cell phones kill off a lot of screenwriting tropes!) and unable to call for help when the fire comes to kill them. It is a long, extended, sad and gripping scene but -- it is intercut with "other action" largely involving Steve McQueen leading his firefigthers elsewhere in the building.

So they beat Nolan by 31 years.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Nolan's brother Jonathan has a big-budget show, Westworld, on HBO which I'm only half way through... and some of the same problems apply and already I'm finding the directorial/narrative heavy hand draining away my interest.

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HBO seems to encourage its series makers to go "heavy, artful and offputting." I may eventually catch up with WestWorld(I loved the 1973 original in 1973), but right now I'm finishing "Deadwood" from over a decade ago and my feeling about that show is this: some of the greatest dialogue, best acting voices, and most interesting "quasi-political" historical drama ever on TV is marred by the showrunner's desire to often keep Deadwood so real about matters of filth and disease and body functions that -- it is sometimes unwatchable even as it is interesting.

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(WW also has the same problem that the Jurassic Park films have as a franchise - how to get more than 2 or 3 hours out of 'amusement park attractions go wild, start killing the guests'. 5 films already seems ludicrous, but WW plans to get 40+ hours of TV out of the same premise!)

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1973 was one of the great movie years, "thoughtful entertainment wise": The Sting, The Exorcist, The Way We Were, Charley Varrick, The Long Goodbye, The Paper Chase...and Westworld, with its VERY cheapjack production values(MGM had gone broke and was working on shoestring productions) and Richard Benjamin and James Brolin in the leads. But I found the idea fascinating. First, that grown adults would want to bask in recreated Western, Medeval and Roman worlds; second that grown men and women would be willing to have sex with pretty robots, and third, that grown adults would be drawn to "fantasies" in which they kill other "people"(robots) in accord with the fantasy world.

And then the robots rebel and start killing the guests.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Pretty neat. And I tell ya, ads I've seen for the HBO Westworld don't convey the pulpy perfection of that original 1973 mid-level movie.

Not only can I not picture the Westworld concept going on for SEASONS (what? the robots just take over and hold folks hostage?)...the sheeny-shiny high art gloss of the new concept seems...wrong to me. WestWorld works best as a "cheese production." A movie remake was contemplated for some time with Sly Stallone and Arnold as the heroes when they were hotter; that might have been just right.

And this: when the plot for "Jurassic Park" -- from Westworld writer Michael Crichton -- was announced in the early 90s', I recall thinking: "Its Westworld again -- but with Spielberg at the controls!"

And yeah -- why DO humans keep going back to Jurassic Park/World and figuring they can run an amusement park there?

PS. The other night during the Thursday Night Football game, they ran about five minutes of the next Jurassic World -- I found it largely unable to shake the memories of about three other films in the franchise. Played out? No, a billion dollar gross.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Big moral: you'd better be really smart and have something *really* important to say if you intend to seriously downgrade character and plot and dialogue and instead prioritize various sorts of directorial/authorial intention.

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Which means, I think, that true art films can only be made by great artists. And often, certain filmmakers(admirably) try to test themselves AS artists by making art films -- and fall short.

Maybe I should say that true GREAT art films can only be made by great artists. Mediocre art films can be made. And are often made by filmmakers who would never be caught dead making narrative films. The art film gene is within filmmakers as much as filmgoers.

All of this brings Hitchcock in through the side door. Psycho has that famous -- and great -- camera spin and dissolve from the blood swirling down the drain to the camera swirling out from Marion's dead eye. This is not "conventional movie narrative" -- and yet, it is not "pure art filmmaking" either. The symbolism is(again) rather overt -- "Marion's life goes down the drain, and dead Marion emerges to accuse us...but of what?" Or something like that. It FEELS like art, but Hitchcock doesn't feel like an art film maker. (I'd say the nightmare sequence in Vertigo plays roughly the same way.)

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[–] swanstep (2715) 7 years ago

Which means, I think, that true art films can only be made by great artists.

Maybe. The Mother! experience also just suggests to me that there different kids of artsy departure from the norms of commercial, narrative with different associated degrees of difficulty both for the artist and the audience.

The degree of difficulty in Mother! is very high because having *zero* relatable/recognizably human characters is a deal-breaker for most audiences. A good contrast is provided by A Ghost Story (2017). On the one hand its DNA includes lots of Tarkovsky and Malick and also some 2000s mumblecore (when there's so little dialogue, it's infuriating when you can't understand 10% of it!). On the other hand, the two leads (Case Affleck and Rooney Mara) are very relatable (at least to me) and the basic story is *very* familiar: AGS in outline just *is* Ghost/Truly Madly Deeply.

AGS's slow pace and mumbly dialogue probably doomed it box-office-wise. This was avoidable; it could, I think, have been an Eternal Sunshine-sized hit with some judicious redubbing and some trimming for pace of a host of unnecessarily long shots.

As is, AGS still worked well for me. It has more good visual ideas than anything else I've seen this year, and had me crying my eyes out by the end. For me, it's a much more successful arty picture than Mother!. Highly recommended with provisos about pacing and mumbly dialogue. Your patience is rewarded.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Which means, I think, that true art films can only be made by great artists.
Maybe. The Mother! experience also just suggests to me that there different kids of artsy departure from the norms of commercial, narrative with different associated degrees of difficulty both for the artist and the audience.

The degree of difficulty in Mother! is very high because having *zero* relatable/recognizably human characters is a deal-breaker for most audiences.

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Agreed. When the people aren't people, but actually "symbols" -- how can one worry or relate about them?I can guess that J-Law's pretty young star qualities at least make Mother something one can relate to in terms of attacks UPON J-Law, but evidently she doesn't act very logically in terms of any human story.

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A good contrast is provided by A Ghost Story (2017).

I read some good things about this. The concept of the ghost literally being in a white sheet with eyeholes seems...cheeky, to me.

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On the one hand its DNA includes lots of Tarkovsky and Malick and also some 2000s mumblecore (when there's so little dialogue, it's infuriating when you can't understand 10% of it!).

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Ha! You are fighting the good fight watching this, swanstep.

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On the other hand, the two leads (Case Affleck and Rooney Mara) are very relatable (at least to me) and the basic story is *very* familiar: AGS in outline just *is* Ghost/Truly Madly Deeply.

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As a person who has lost some parent-level relatives to death in recent years, I found myself pondering the afterlife and its presentation on film. The horror template is of ghosts being terrifying, monstrous out-to-get-you beings; the "metaphysical" template is that these ghosts are there to help you, to comfort you, to create within you a hard-desired belief that "they are not really gone." Thus we have "the good ghosts" of Ghost and Truly Madly Deeply, and the bad ghosts of The Haunting and those more-base movies where the ghosts faces turn into death skulls.

It is worth noting that Hitchcock for many years wanted to direct a ghost story called "Mary Rose." He even had the tag-line planned: "Mary Rose, A Ghost Story By Alfred Hitchocck." From what I've read of Mary Rose(from a James Barrie play; he wrote Peter Pan), the ghost in "Mary Rose" is a being of sadness, of lost love. And Hitchcock posited a theme to the story to Truffaut: "If the dead were to come back, what would you do with them?"

Time Magazine critic Stefan Kanfer opined: "You'd call it Topaz."

Meanwhile, Carlotta Montes in Vertigo, and the real (dead) Mrs. Bates in Psycho can be seen as "psychological ghosts" haunting Madeleine and Norman.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 7 years ago

I read some good things about this. The concept of the ghost literally being in a white sheet with eyeholes seems...cheeky, to me.

It is cheeky and a little like an SNL skit at first, but gradually it starts to seem like a stroke of visual genius. It turns out that you can read a *lot* from someone's posture and head movements and trembling etc. through a sheet... and the folds of the draped sheet make for interesting shadows and curves as lighting changes; exactly what sort of sheet it is comes into play as does the amount of dirt that the sheet picks up over time.... and so on. It's so great that by the end it seems incredible that nobody thought of doing this before! (I half-remember an obscure Japanese or Taiwanese film having the same core idea but that may be the deja vu feeling I have playing me false....)

Anyhow, AGS won't be for everyone, although anyone who calls it one of the worst movies of the year as someone at Salon did is an idiot and dead to me. But it *is* frustrating how close AGS is to being *for everyone*, a consensus classic.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

AGS's slow pace and mumbly dialogue probably doomed it box-office-wise. This was avoidable; it could, I think, have been an Eternal Sunshine-sized hit with some judicious redubbing and some trimming for pace of a host of unnecessarily long shots.

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Well, the maker makes the film he wants to make, and takes the consequences. It raises an issue: think of all the potentially great movies out there that were ruined because the script or director botched the better possiblitiies of the premise. Happens all the time, really. Which is why with great films, our feeling is: "That story was told JUST RIGHT."

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As is, AGS still worked well for me. It has more good visual ideas than anything else I've seen this year, and had me crying my eyes out by the end. For me, it's a much more successful arty picture than Mother!. Highly recommended with provisos about pacing and mumbly dialogue. Your patience is rewarded.

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I'll take that recommendation. Thank you. The fact that it ended in tears for you tells me that it had an ability to connect emotionally with its audience that a lot of art films don't have -- art films often "play cold" because they refuse to play to human emotion.

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