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This may be kind of an E/N post, but it involves film literacy and I needed to get these thoughts down somewhere so this seemed the best place. There's a kind of film genre that I've been noticing as a through-line in a lot of recent movies, in particular the ones that a person I know is apparently very drawn to; it's the kind that centers around a protagonist who is billed as ~having a DREAM~ that is all but a compulsion in nature, something he has to pursue, something the pursuit of which is presented as implicitly noble. Examples: The Astronaut Farmer (Billy Bob Thornton's dream is to build a rocket and fly it into space himself), Ford v. Ferrari ("WHO ARE YOU", "A RACING DRIVER"), The World's Fastest Indian (Anthony Hopkins must set a speed record at Bonneville or die trying). Also a lot of sports movies and biopics about musicians; films like Ali and Ray come to mind. The person in question seems to find what I think is an unhealthy amount of self-fulfillment in projecting himself into these movies since I'm pretty sure he envisions himself as being exactly this kind of person, whose dream of Jonathan Livingston Seagull-esque speed or flight or achievement of physical breakthroughs is so self-evidently noble that everyone around him should just immediately understand and self-sacrificially support it. And there's nothing wrong with the way these stories are presented in these movies at a conceptual level; it's fine and laudable to want to push yourself to achieve great things. But I also think it foments a poisonous feedback loop in some people's minds who are predisposed to a certain kind of self-centeredness and contempt for society and "normies" (for lack of a better word). To hear this person say it, you have to chase your dream, you have to want it. And if you don't want something enough, or you don't pursue your goal to the fullest possible extent and to the sacrifice of all you have and all you are, you're a garbage person and a waste of life and irrelevant to the conversation. Being a badass is just a matter of willpower and refusal to ever give up, etc. There is a variety of ways a film can present the framing that leads to this mindset, some more egregiously than others. I feel like the cutover to  happens when other people are required to work to help the protagonist fulfill his dream. Like for example in Indian the guy's pursuit of his dream of speed is self-funded, it's not to anyone else's detriment (except making noise in the morning and almost burning his neighbor's house down); the townspeople pull together to send him to America just as a nice gesture for a likable old weird guy. But in Ferrari Ken Miles pursues his singleminded desire to drive race cars to the degree that it makes him unemployable and impossible to get along with by anyone except his long-suffering wife, and Carroll Shelby has to stick his neck out again and again in order to secure Miles' test-driver job and keep him there in spite of Ford's persistent resistance; and in Astronaut Farmer the guy puts his entire life savings into building his rocket—and then, alarmingly (to me)—his wife's father dies and she unhesitatingly gives him her entire $X00,000 inheritance in order to allow him to keep going. (When I saw that movie I wondered why, when the wife first pushed back against his crazy singleminded project, the guy in question didn't shout "bitch" or "don't stick your dick in crazy" like he usually does whenever a wife or girlfriend protests against the protagonist in a movie, like the wives in The Right Stuff. Turns out it's because in this case she ends up laying down her entire life and fortune just so he can go to space like he wants to. And apparently this is supposed to be seen as noble and praiseworthy behavior for a wife and partner.)So I guess my point is—am I wrong in thinking this kind of narrative thread is playing on a latent pernicious streak in some people to think of themselves as just too special for the mundane world, that they're just so cool everyone should drop everything and dedicate their lives to sending this one guy to Le Mans or Bonneville or space? Or is this just a me problem / this person problem? We've always collectively desired Great Man stories but I feel like it may be a kind of a thing a lot of people are being encouraged to react to in a certain way and it can't be helping society in the age of FYGM. How many other movies/stories follow this pattern? Do any subvert it (like by showing how a quixotic quest just ends up nearly destroying the person's life and that's a good thing because other people's lives actually do have meaning and value too, not just the solipsistic protagonist's)? I'm sure I could think of some (lol yeah there's Don Quixote) Also what would be a good name for this style of movie that I can use to derisively refer to it. Like an "I'm Just So Awesome the Rules Don't Apply To Me" movie Data Graham fucked around with this message at 15:38 on Jan 3, 2024 |
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Jan 3, 2024 15:27
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Anonymous Robot posted:Data Graham, I highly recommend that you check out Wings of Honneamise, alternatively titled Royal Space Force, which deals directly with your concern. Ah good point, I just rewatched that a year or two ago. I need to refresh it again with this context in mind
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Jan 3, 2024 15:52
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Gaius Marius posted:It's literally every Micheal Mann movie This bodes well for when we finally get Ferrari on stream Flying Zamboni posted:The TV show The Dropout from a couple of years ago was a fun take on this kind of story. It's a dramatization of the Elizabeth Holmes story so there's a lot of stuff early on with Holmes being a scrappy underdog in the biotech industry fighting against the more experienced people telling her she can't make her dream a reality, only in this case those people telling her to give up on her dreams were absolutely correct and she was making a product that didn't work at all and was a huge scam. Good call, WeCrashed counts too I guess. "I manifested it  " runs the risk of seeming like vindication of course, with the ultimate downfall being everyone's fault but his own, for not committing and sacrificing enough
Data Graham fucked around with this message at 16:07 on Jan 3, 2024 |
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Jan 3, 2024 16:02
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Yeah, I wouldn't count a protagonist who is swept along by the tides of history, even if those tides lead him to heights of greatness or tragedy. More like, a person just decides arbitrarily that HE has a high and lonely destiny, and everybody else can either get on board with that (and give him all their money) or he has no time for them.
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Jan 3, 2024 16:49
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therattle posted:Interesting. I think there is quite a lot of overlap with your friend and his perception of the world and following one's dream to the detriment of everything and everyone else, and a lot of Ayn Rand's characters like Howard Roark and John Galt*. It's a hyper-individualistic view of the world, and I think inherently selfish. it's always about one person (usually a man, so add misogyny to the mix) fighting for their dream - very rarely do we see films or stories about groups or communities banding together to accomplish something amazing. That would track, and I bet if challenged he would say "yes, and people like me/Ken Miles/Carroll Shelby/Rand al'Thor/pick your favorite self-styled Chosen One or Randian ubermensch etc serve a valuable purpose to the world, which is to inspire everyone else to something greater than their dreary beige lives. That is how humanity elevates itself, by each person individually trying to become Alexander the Great or Chuck Yeager or Napoleon, not by dreaming of nothing greater than being a cog in a machine or a Matrix battery. That's how we advance as a species" Which is kind of terrifying to me, it feels like this is how you get people talking themselves into leading suicide cults or taking over countries. Because ultimately we know all the fallacies of greatmanitude, and we know that mankind doesn't advance through individual flashes of "eureka" brilliance out of a sea of boring stasis; all of humanity slowly marches forward and one person might be a half a step ahead but if he wasn't there someone else would be along shortly to accomplish the same feat. Which isn't to minimize personal achievement, it's just to argue for the value of community and colloquy, especially when the result is greater than the sum of its parts. Fuckin billy bob thornton couldn't have built his rocket if he hadn't stolen the plans from NASA
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Jan 3, 2024 21:26
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josh04 posted:Gotta awkwardly jump in here with my video on similar themes, 'The Fanatic' Pausing the video at this point to note that I do not find it a dreary waste of time
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Jan 4, 2024 15:28
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I'll admit that I have a real hard time knowing when a movie is "bad". Like okay I can recognize cheap sets or incoherent plots or unrealistic dialogue, but plenty of times I'll watch a movie that I think is perfectly well executed, intricate, lavish, well acted, and I'll look up some reviews afterwards and learn that it's been universally panned as utter trash. It's often to the point where the acting has to be Keanu-in-Dracula bad for me to accurately predict that the reviewers will have called out "bad acting" specifically, because beyond that point I apparently literally don't know what bad acting looks like. (Not helped by the fact that every single Oscar for Best Actor has always gone to the leading man/lady, which to me doesn't pass the sniff test; like are you telling me that Lamp Squarejaw over here is actually the best actor in this ensemble of 24 major speaking roles? But then I think this is a common theme with me, I don't know what makes a "bad" whiskey or a "bad" book or a "bad" piece of music, not unless it's so offensive to my senses that I can't find a single thing bearable about it. I always figure there's just something I'm missing
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Jan 12, 2024 02:02
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Right, and I know that the criteria I try to use are things like: Writing: All plot elements are neatly tied up, bonus points for intricate callbacks and subplot resolutions, and every scene feels like it has a specific purpose to the story; Pixar stuff or Gone Girl or etc, whereas Hateful Eight makes me feel unfulfilled because the resolving elements were introduced right at the end, but then again it does explain things nicely so who am I to argue Acting: It feels like a feat; like pulling something off like the Trial of Tim Heidecker makes me sit up and clap but I couldn't begin to tell you what makes Cillian Murphy deserving of a Best Actor, but you know he'll win Message: It says something that resonates with me and doesn't make me mad about what it's apparently saying days or weeks later like The Astronaut Farmer, fucks sake gently caress that movie But that's just me. I know it's all personal and idiosyncratic and we all want different things from our entertainment
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Jan 12, 2024 02:25
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Gaius Marius posted:I think you need to try harder to engage with why other people find certain performances or scenes moving rather than try to dismiss it as simply other opinions. Yeah I mean you're right, I don't mean to dismiss anything. My usual assumption is that there's something I'm not picking up on, rather than just "everything is subjective". Probably worded that badly. But that's part of what I'm getting at. I can't ever write something off as "bad" unless it's just utterly incompetent. I'm more often taken by surprise when something is widely maligned than when something is widely celebrated, because I'm way more likely to assume it's better than I'm able to appreciate or understand.
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Jan 12, 2024 03:13
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Hella cool, and so obvious in retrospect. I went to the US Open a few years ago and they had one of these, it's a tiny little stadium so it's zipping around right over everybody's heads, and dropping down to hover right next to the players as they walk around between points. Probably still a better solution than a drone in many situations
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Jan 16, 2024 00:00
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It will be bringing no harbs.
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Jan 24, 2024 15:26
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Fuckin hell I just rewatched Argo and thought the whole time that was Rene Auberjonois in an uncredited role or something but it was Victor Garber Kept going "HUHH!" every time he was on screen
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Feb 3, 2024 06:00
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Someone identify a movie for me There's a scene where the adult boyfriend is waiting for his girlfriend to get ready, and he's standing awkwardly in the living room with her father who is dourly watching TV. He tries to make conversation, says "Hi Mr. So-and-so" and the father just sits there apparently ignoring him. "What are you watching?" And he just silently points at the TV  I thought it was Grosse Pointe Blank (it has that similar scene setup) but it isn't that. I want to say maybe Peggy Sue Got Married or something?
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Feb 3, 2024 17:17
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I watched A Little Chaos (that one about the gardener to Louis XIV) and it seemed like she'd aged straight from 18 to 50 since last time I'd seen her. Casting for "women of a certain age" is famously thin on the ground unless you're doing shows like Wheel of Time or, like, Bad Sisters which seem tailor-made to address exactly that issue.
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Feb 15, 2024 11:48
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:I freaking love that movie what did you think of it? It was excellent, and I found it to be one of those movies where I have to pause it every few minutes to sketch the actors emoting. I have several pages of doodles of Winslet and Rickman pulling faces lol Gods & Monsters was another one
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Feb 15, 2024 22:08
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What a weird way to go through life Not enviable
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Feb 16, 2024 19:08
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Why was San Francisco such a filming hotspot in the 70s? Dirty Harry, The Conversation, Play Misty For Me, etc
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Feb 18, 2024 20:44
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Oh yeah, I should have remembered the Hitchcocks. Even The Birds, which is North Bay.
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Feb 18, 2024 22:27
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Waffleman_ posted:Watching Brotherhood of the Wolf, and this is already very cool I remember seeing that in theaters and of the ~10 other people in the showing, a couple of middle-age guys got up and stomped out snarling once it became obvious that it was in French
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Feb 26, 2024 02:48
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Basebf555 posted:I guess what happened with him is that he was judged to be almost too good looking. Like sure he could play a fictional storybook swashbuckling hero but he doesn't exactly have the face for more nuanced lead roles. At least that's what I'm guessing the perception was at the time. Yeah it's like he was so firmly destined to be an Errol Flynn for the modern era, that nobody could picture casting him as anything else. And once you've done The Princess Bride and a Robin Hood parody what else is anyone going to make in the genre?
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Feb 28, 2024 03:29
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I was led to believe (by Gary Larson) that Ishtar was a movie of such transcendent badness that it would scar me for life. I still haven't seen it but from what I gather he was just going by hearsay and it isn't notably bad at all
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Mar 2, 2024 22:08
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Sounds like someone missed out on Amatocom.com
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Mar 11, 2024 10:48
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Failed Imagineer posted:I think Claes Bang is definitely on my must-watch actors list, dude is diverse and charismatic as hell. He's the rear end in a top hat central figure in Bad Sisters, my GOD he is hateable
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Mar 15, 2024 13:21
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True, and very much on-point for a particular brand of toxic person who seems to be particularly ascendant today. Just perpetually adolescent and aggrieved, painfully aware he's nothing special really, and taking it out on everyone around him who is better than him but whom he has unearned power over anyway. Everything that goes wrong is someone else's fault. It's very cathartic and while it may have seemed indulgent to drag out the climax I felt it was entirely justified to make sure that final episode gave everyone enough satisfaction and didn't gloss over a bit of it.
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Mar 15, 2024 14:14
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Flying Zamboni posted:It's loving awful and was written about a lady that turned him down when he asked her out and she thought he was huge weirdo for writing a song about her lol. Well that sure changes how it hits  
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Mar 15, 2024 16:59
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Waffleman_ posted:The entire reason I'm not fond of the modern films is because they treat Ghostbusters like a sacred franchise when it was a slightly raunchy comedy about a buncha slob scientists. I remember there was a thread here a few years ago about Ghostbusters that was just pages and pages and pages of gushing about the color palette, staging, prop work, all the little details of visuals, just screenshot after screenshot after screenshot, the OP just kept raving for months about it and I was more or less on board because I assumed anyone going to that degree of art-book intensity either knew a whole bunch I didn't, or was doing a really, really dedicated bit
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Mar 18, 2024 20:48
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFuwQLeiwMM
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Apr 2, 2024 11:57
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I feel like I have to see this now, no matter how bad it apparently isquote:An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn (stylized on-screen as Burn Hollywood Burn) is a 1997 American mockumentary black comedy film directed by Arthur Hiller, written by Joe Eszterhas and starring Eric Idle as a director unfortunately named Alan Smithee, a traditional pseudonym used in Hollywood for directors disowning a project. The film follows Smithee as he steals the negatives to his latest film and goes on the run. All I can say is: lol Like the goatee-universe version of Wizard of Speed and Time
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Apr 21, 2024 21:02
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Reminder that there's a universe out there where Arnold played Kyle Reese and the Terminator was played by OJ Simpson.
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Apr 24, 2024 19:02
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It's probably a lot of complicated factors but it's still really funny and jarring to go back to an 80s/90s blockbuster like Top Gun or Risky Business or the Thomas Crown Affair (lol) and at the 65% mark there is ALWAYS a sex break. Complete with montage music that you can tell will go on the soundtrack just so Movies still follow formulas and patterns of a sort but it's wild how slavish it used to be
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May 3, 2024 13:32
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I think I remember a Ramona Quimby book where she demanded to know why, if going to the bathroom is so important that they showed all the kids where the bathroom is on the first day, they don't mention in the story when Joe the Construction Worker went to the bathroom?
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May 3, 2024 17:45
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Like Mitch Hedberg, all "Have you ever tried sugar ... or PCP?"
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May 4, 2024 18:09
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It seems like it's always a better idea to do a pastiche of two or more figures with your parody characters because a) you get to make fun of a concept rather than a specific person, and b) you have plausible deniability in case they get mad. In the case of the Bautista guy you can always say "Nonono, it wasn't Tate, it was more Joe Rogan!" etc (I think my favorite stunt multiball pastiche was "Professor Hawk" in Dexter's Lab who was a mashup of Jobs, Gates, Stephen Hawking, and Willy Wonka)
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May 6, 2024 16:17
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They're just really tired Only so many hours in the day
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May 8, 2024 13:54
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Mrs. Lovett always seemed to me like a role that had basically been written for Angela Lansbury, even before I knew it pretty much had been. Helena Bonham-Carter just doesn't feel right, even apart from not being old enough
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May 8, 2024 20:56
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The only true Alice in Wonderland is the musical TV movie from the 80s with creepy Carol Channing and 100 other washed-up Vegas-era stars https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-jpV025fWo My brother inflicts this scene on his daughters with great glee to terrify them
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May 9, 2024 02:22
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