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Bolek posted:What are you referring to here specifically? "Don't get addicted to drugs because it is bad for you" is creepy regressive politics
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Sep 5, 2013 08:35
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Requiem is based on a book anyway?
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Sep 5, 2013 13:15
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DIEGETIC SPACEMAN posted:the monkey scene. Precisely where I shut it off. I'd watch The Rock kick rear end all day long but I can't loving stand the awful comedy bits in that movie.
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Sep 5, 2013 13:19
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Chichevache posted:Tambor is in this? I'm sold. Don't do it, you have so much to live for! weekly font posted:I've never seen a movie that muddled its messages so much. Advertising is bad so kill it with advertising (until there is no more advertising?). Stalin was the first advertiser but advertisement breeds capitalism! I might have some of this wrong but it was without a shadow of a doubt the most baffling film I've ever seen in so many ways. Also one of the worst edited. Also LeeLee Sobieski. I love how the protagonist and Max von Sydow never meet. It's such a baffling film that it never should have existed.
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Sep 5, 2013 15:10
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I know it's been up for a while, but Sherlock is an amazing show. More shows should get a feature-length slot to tell a story.
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Sep 5, 2013 16:53
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Alfred P. Pseudonym posted:"Don't get addicted to drugs because it is bad for you" is creepy regressive politics Drug addiction isn't bad for you? That aside, Aronofsky has talked at lenght about how he didn't consider Requiem a drug addict movie. Rather it's an addiction movie, whether that addiction is to heroin, TV or hope is besides the point. Darren Aronofsky posted:What Selby is saying is that anything can be a drug -- it doesn't have to be smack. It could be TV, it can be coffee, it can be chocolate, it can be food, it can be hope, it could be love, it could be sex. The idea that the same inner monologue goes through a person's head when they're trying quit drugs as with cigarettes, as when they're trying to not eat food so they can lose 20 pounds, was really fascinating to me. I thought it was an idea that we hadn't seen on film and I wanted to bring it up on the screen. Anyone who hasn't seen Requiem before, it's totally worth a watch, and his camerawork and editing chops are on full, stellar display. The movie is excellent, and worth your time. You just will not ever want to watch it again. Raskolnikov2089 fucked around with this message at 17:16 on Sep 5, 2013 |
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Sep 5, 2013 17:14
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Raskolnikov2089 posted:Anyone who hasn't seen Requiem before, it's totally worth a watch, and his camerawork and editing chops are on full, stellar display. The movie is excellent, and worth your time. You just will not ever want to watch it again. 
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Sep 5, 2013 17:36
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I knew a few people in High School that said they had watched RfaD over and over again and I just couldn't wrap my head around anyone wanting to do that. When I saw it I thought it was a good movie, but never before had I ever wanted to rewatch a movie less.
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Sep 5, 2013 17:46
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DIEGETIC SPACEMAN posted:I gave this a shot today, and... it's not that fun. It's definitely not a bad movie. It's entertaining for the most part, the Rock and Christopher Walken are perfect for their roles (Walken's tooth fairy speech made the movie worthwhile), and Rosario Dawson and Sean William Scott hold her own. But dear god, the comic relief bits with Scott are just bad. They drag the whole thing down. If Beavis and Butt-head weren't fictional characters, I'd swear they wrote the monkey scene. I would describe The Rock as the only one earnestly acting in movies where everyone else is phoning it in for a paycheck. I think it pays off, because he's awesome in Pain & Gain (which is $4.99 on Amazon streaming.) E: New episodes of The League! red19fire fucked around with this message at 18:17 on Sep 5, 2013 |
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Sep 5, 2013 17:51
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Egbert Souse posted:I know it's been up for a while, but Sherlock is an amazing show. More shows should get a feature-length slot to tell a story. I watched Sherlock a second time, and probably a third soon. I'm surprised how easily I was hooked and never bored. Can't wait for the 3rd season. gently caress,it's taking so long. And I agree with that,I stopped watching Supernatural since like episode 5 once I saw how many season I had left, and how many episodes had each season.
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Sep 5, 2013 18:08
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I'm glad to see people not liking Requiem for a Dream in here. There was a time when people would look at me like I had a dick growing out of my head when I said it wasn't very good. It's way too on-the-nose. It's like watching a modern version of Reefer Madness (and yes I know it's not solely about drug addiction).
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Sep 5, 2013 18:45
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Think of the final scene/shot of The Wrestler, and imagine if the movie just spelled out exactly what happens after the fade-to-black instead of simply heavily implying it. That's what the ending sequence of Requiem for a Dream does, three times simultaneously. That, and none of the characters are given an "out", bad poo poo simply happens because of their respective addictions. The Ram could've retired at any time, he had a choice to leave the business. It actually gives the final scene in the film some weight. With Requiem you feel bad for the people, but the entire film is just a gauntlet of progressively more-depressing ordeals being thrust upon them and their agency is taken away. I guess for me it felt like watching Irreversible but in chronological order. King Vidiot fucked around with this message at 00:09 on Sep 6, 2013 |
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Sep 5, 2013 19:26
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Raskolnikov2089 posted:Drug addiction isn't bad for you? Sorry, I meant that as sarcasm. I like the movie.
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Sep 5, 2013 19:47
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Mike Birbiglia's new stand-up/storytelling hour, My Girlfriend's Boyfriend, is up on Netflix, and if you liked Sleepwalk With Me, even a little bit, you'll certainly like this one. It's just as fantastic.
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Sep 5, 2013 20:10
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Sweet, going to check that out later.
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Sep 5, 2013 20:29
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Pierat posted:Requiem is based on a book anyway? This is more what I was getting at.
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Sep 5, 2013 21:39
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weekly font posted:I've never seen a movie that muddled its messages so much. Advertising is bad so kill it with advertising (until there is no more advertising?). Stalin was the first advertiser but advertisement breeds capitalism! I might have some of this wrong but it was without a shadow of a doubt the most baffling film I've ever seen in so many ways. Also one of the worst edited. Also LeeLee Sobieski. Well, I am gonna defend it here - the lead character (I couldn't tell you what his name was) seems to understand that he can only think of things in terms of advertising not only because of his profession but because his life is inundated with the stuff, which is why he makes a clean break. Everything after that, you're kind of on your own. Bolek posted:What are you referring to here specifically? I gotta think it's an off-handed reference to: http://exiledonline.com/david-foster-wallace-portrait-of-an-infinitely-limited-mind/ And nothing in modern US literature comes closer to ICP than Selby’s Requiem for a Dream, a sadistic 280-page Chick tract disguised as an avant-garde heroin novel. In his ‘99 preface, Selby attacks what he calls “the Great American Dream,” the evil, illusory pursuit of pleasure and possessions that “ultimately… destroys everything and everyone involved with it.” This is the novel’s Puritan core – all ‘worldly’ pleasures are false and drugs always lead to the worst fate imaginable. Requiem has an Evangelical stink right from the schmaltzy dedication page: “This book is dedicated, with love, to Bobby, who has found the only pound of pure – Faith in a Loving God.” Selby also plucks an epigraph from the book of Psalms (“Except the LORD build the house, they labor in vain that build it…”) just to drive home the (Calvinist) point that human beings can’t do anything for themselves without a Higher Power. He illustrates this by shifting the narrative between four characters: a junkie named Harry, his token black friend Tyrone, his Jewish mother Sara, and his model girlfriend Marion. I guess this is meant to show that addiction is a universal condition, affecting all the Unsaved: young and old, male and female, Jew and gentile, black and white. (Except it’s not true – few things are more relevant to the consequences of drug use than money and skin colour; sometimes they’re more relevant than the drug itself.) While Harry and Friends are feeding their smack addictions, the mother starts amphetamines to drop a few kilos, convinced she’ll soon appear on a game show. Within three months, she loses her mind, undergoes ECT (an extremely unlikely treatment for speed psychosis, even in the 70s) and spends the end of the book as a drooling vegetable. Meanwhile, Harry’s girlfriend Marion suffers a fate worse than death. (Having to work for a living, basically.) As for Harry himself, he loses an arm. Darren Aronofsky, who directed the film version, calls this “a very traditional heroin story.” No, Darren, it’s a loving depressing heroin story! What kind of sick gently caress would write a novel about a one-armed junkie? An Evangelical, that’s who. and so on. HUNDU THE BEAST GOD fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Sep 5, 2013 |
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Sep 5, 2013 21:44
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:I gotta think it's an off-handed reference to: This is an interesting read, but I sort of feel bad for someone that can spit venom for that long.
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Sep 5, 2013 22:03
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Yeah it is insanely bilous and is almost my exact reaction. Glazov (and Yasha Levine and Mark Ames) are all good writers but sometimes you want to tell them to have a cup of tea and relax for two seconds.
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Sep 5, 2013 22:08
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Well, I am gonna defend it here - the lead character (I couldn't tell you what his name was) seems to understand that he can only think of things in terms of advertising not only because of his profession but because his life is inundated with the stuff, which is why he makes a clean break. Everything after that, you're kind of on your own. Pretty much. Glazov is way over the top there, and it's not that Requiem is a bad film all in all - it certainly looks great, at least. But it's like the definition of specious - it seems totally with it, until you think for a few seconds and realize it's just a drug PSA filmed by a brilliant director. By comparison to his other films, it's an absurd and laughable waste of his talents. Ames and Levine are now writing/editing for nsfwcorp, by the way, which has been pretty great so far.
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Sep 5, 2013 22:34
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Interestingly, Aronofsky went on a decade later to make anti-meth PSAs and they are mini-horror movies. He has a talent for it, that's for sure.
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Sep 5, 2013 22:40
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He must have been insufferable to know at school: -Hey Glazov what'd you think of that assembly we had about drugs? -I'm sick of these crypto-calvinist pigs coming here with their anti-drug propaganda.
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Sep 5, 2013 22:40
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Yeah it is insanely bilous and is almost my exact reaction. Glazov (and Yasha Levine and Mark Ames) are all good writers but sometimes you want to tell them to have a cup of tea and relax for two seconds. Did you read his screed against David Foster Wallace? HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Interestingly, Aronofsky went on a decade later to make anti-meth PSAs and they are mini-horror movies. He has a talent for it, that's for sure.
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Sep 5, 2013 22:40
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Bolek posted:Did you read his screed against David Foster Wallace? Yeah, that's what I linked, he starts freewheeling a bit like four thousand words in.
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Sep 5, 2013 22:47
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Hahah , so that's why it seemed familiar. Maybe I'll click the link next time.
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Sep 5, 2013 22:50
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Bolek posted:Did you read his screed against David Foster Wallace? It's the same article. efb
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Sep 5, 2013 22:50
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Requiem failed for me because it seems like Aronofsky went into it with nothing more to say than "addiction can develop around many things and only leads to pain." It had almost no emotional impact because there's nothing to the characters besides their addictions. The only impression you have through the whole film is that you're watching a director/writer beat up on some characters in whom neither he nor you have any investment because he thinks subjecting them to increasing pain and humiliation through the film will elicit an emotional response that will dispose you to his view rather than articulating anything insightful. The tract analogy works here. The problem is that since the film doesn't care about the characters except as vehicles for a message about addiction, they never become anything with enough dimension to have capacity for suffering, so what's occurring on the screen never resonates as actual suffering. It's always surprised me that Requiem met with so much acclaim and The Fountain with so much criticism while they share many of the same flaws, though Fountain is in many ways a more interesting film because there is a genuine struggle, uncertainty and anxiety about the subject matter which Requiem lacks. I agree with a few other posters that Aronofsky really found his post-Pi stride when he stopped trying to make ~a heartbreaking work of staggering genius~ and we got The Wrestler and Black Swan.
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Sep 5, 2013 22:54
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I've found Aronofsky to be a filmmaker who does some of the best melodrama I've ever seen. He beats you over the head with the themes quite a bit and I enjoy every minute of it. I can't think of a movie of his I've disliked.
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Sep 6, 2013 03:10
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Breakfast All Day posted:Requiem failed for me because it seems like Aronofsky went into it with nothing more to say than "addiction can develop around many things and only leads to pain." It had almost no emotional impact because there's nothing to the characters besides their addictions. The only impression you have through the whole film is that you're watching a director/writer beat up on some characters in whom neither he nor you have any investment because he thinks subjecting them to increasing pain and humiliation through the film will elicit an emotional response that will dispose you to his view rather than articulating anything insightful. The tract analogy works here. The problem is that since the film doesn't care about the characters except as vehicles for a message about addiction, they never become anything with enough dimension to have capacity for suffering, so what's occurring on the screen never resonates as actual suffering. I've never seen Requiem, but this is spot-on one of my major criticisms of Funny Games only I've never been able to articulate it so succinctly. Only it's especially terrible because we're supposed to feel bad watching the suffering of the non-characters, and then feel bad about ourselves in that we, the horror movie audience, wanted to see the suffering in the first place. Man, gently caress you Funny Games.
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Sep 6, 2013 04:37
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My legit favorite thing about Aronofsky is he seems to make the same movie over and over again but it turns out completely differently every time. I really do mean that in the best possible way. Pi and Black swan being on my short list of favorite movies of all time.
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Sep 6, 2013 04:44
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My biggest complaint about Funny Games was that it was boring as loving hell. Yeah director, I'm sure you're very meta, making the audience suffer through a 20 minute scene where nothing happens. Screw off.
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Sep 6, 2013 04:46
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axleblaze posted:My legit favorite thing about Aronofsky is he seems to make the same movie over and over again but it turns out completely differently every time. I really do mean that in the best possible way. Pi and Black swan being on my short list of favorite movies of all time.
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Sep 6, 2013 04:52
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Wolfsheim posted:I've never seen Requiem, but this is spot-on one of my major criticisms of Funny Games only I've never been able to articulate it so succinctly. I hate this idea that we're complicit in the suffering of movie characters because a) complicit in what, exactly? They're fictional characters, we're supposed to feel for-real bad for making them suffer? Like if we weren't big meanies who watch movies for fun then these characters would be off in Movieland living happily ever after? and b) we don't enjoy the suffering, we enjoy seeing the good guys victorious in the end. (Well, maybe not edgy internet commenters.) The suffering is a means to an end. Without the bad guys tormenting the good guys, there's nothing for the good guys to triumph over. I guess if he was making a Jason movie or something where we just like seeing the dumb teenagers getting killed it would make more sense, but in a thriller-type movie like Funny Games we want to see Mel Gibson wriggle free and save his family and punish the bad guys. Or at the very least we want to see if he's going to be able to do it.
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Sep 6, 2013 05:10
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I just don't get the PSA criticism. I mean, yeah, all those anti-drug assemblies you had in school sucked, that doesn't mean that anything which shows heroin use as negative is equivalent to Reefer Madness. It's not what you say, it's how you say it.
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Sep 6, 2013 06:05
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But that was exactly the problem. Requiem said it in the same way as Reefer Madness but with auteur directing. Anyway Breakfast All Day said it better.
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Sep 6, 2013 06:24
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Monkeyseesaw posted:But that was exactly the problem. Requiem said it in the same way as Reefer Madness but with auteur directing. Except with actual characters and not-terrible pacing and good visuals and so on. Have you actually seen Reefer Madness? It's mind-numbingly dull.
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Sep 6, 2013 06:27
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But to be fair, Trainspotting was about how heroin abuse and addictive lifestyles are soul-sucking and destroy the lives of the users and everyone around them, and it handled it so much better than Requiem. It was also, in my opinion, a much better movie.
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Sep 6, 2013 15:12
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I love Pi and Black Swan, but I can't bring myself to watch Requiem for a Dream -- I've worked at, like, the heroin capital of the world for the last five years and watch people crumble into dust from visit to visit. I'm not sure I want to see Artist's Impression Of What Happens In Between Narcan Doses.
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Sep 6, 2013 15:24
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I only liked Funny Games for 2 reasons: 1. If you saw it with an audience in theaters, you got to watch a room full of people get extremely pissed off at a movie, which was hilarious. I've never seen a movie more dedicated to trolling it's audience. 2. Afterwards I was able describe it with the word "Brechtian", which for a brief moment meant I got some use out of my liberal arts degree.
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Sep 6, 2013 16:03
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Maxwell Lord posted:I just don't get the PSA criticism. I mean, yeah, all those anti-drug assemblies you had in school sucked, that doesn't mean that anything which shows heroin use as negative is equivalent to Reefer Madness. It's not what you say, it's how you say it. On the one hand, Requiem for a Dream is absolutely a cheap horrors-of-drugs melodrama. But I think there's a place for those, especially when they're shot, assembled and acted so well. I think people are going to be looking back on that movie as a landmark in editing for years and years.
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Sep 6, 2013 16:12
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