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The book deeply, deeply disturbed me, and I feel like the movie doesn't compromise itself. They only show it once or twice but even as the building is getting to its absolute worst, people are still going outside and doing their jobs. The whole building is people of the professional class, from top to bottom. Even the people on the lower floors are well-off, though everyone is heavily in debt. This happens in the real world, too. You never know what a coworker might be going home to. People manage to clean themselves up and get themselves out the door even when they live in the most unimaginable conditions. Nightmares have their own internal logic. A situation that seems crazy to someone looking from the outside in may seem totally normal when you're really mired in it.
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Sep 7, 2016 04:56
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cheerfullydrab posted:The book deeply, deeply disturbed me, and I feel like the movie doesn't compromise itself. They only show it once or twice but even as the building is getting to its absolute worst, people are still going outside and doing their jobs. The whole building is people of the professional class, from top to bottom. Even the people on the lower floors are well-off, though everyone is heavily in debt. This happens in the real world, too. You never know what a coworker might be going home to. People manage to clean themselves up and get themselves out the door even when they live in the most unimaginable conditions. Nightmares have their own internal logic. A situation that seems crazy to someone looking from the outside in may seem totally normal when you're really mired in it. Well yeah; the film version is simply about The Internet. (Bataille is the dude who had a profound religious experience when pretty much literally goatse'd by a baboon). The film absolutely doesn't work as a social satire because it takes place in a magical VR where people conjure the trashbags full of diapers into existence because they know they can't actually get sick. Death in the film signifies merely unpopularity, e.g. that Royal's thought has become outmoded.
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Sep 7, 2016 15:35
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Anal Surgery posted:However, it was just so... unsubtle about everything. I just finished the book an hour ago and Ballard literally spends half a page explaining each metaphor he introduces. It gets really, really annoying. Anyway, I thought this movie was okay. The book has been on my Reading List for years, I thought it was fine. I would have liked to have seen the roving Female Death Gangs at the end, but then they would have had to introduce Laing's sister (who was a resident in the book, not dead) and that would have been... weird.
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Sep 8, 2016 20:05
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I loved it. It was like watching a movie written and directed by SMG. It felt like it took a lot from Clockwork Orange despite not being similar in a way I can explain, it is obviously what they were going for though considering the poster is a ripoff of the Clockwork Orange one.
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Sep 9, 2016 16:15
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D-Pad posted:I loved it. It was like watching a movie written and directed by SMG.
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Sep 9, 2016 16:39
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Halloween Jack posted:I would expect that to be the plot of Star Wars mixed with Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy with a lot of Jesus references and giant monsters fighting giant robots. I meant it more as if you took an SMG analysis of a film and then shot that film again but you made everything SMG said overt instead of hidden under the top layer you would get something similar to high rise. It's like a critic's fever dream.
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Sep 9, 2016 17:15
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High-Rise is not at all my style.
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Sep 9, 2016 17:54
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:High-Rise is not at all my style. What would you recommend instead, but related in some way?
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Sep 10, 2016 07:01
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Lord Krangdar posted:What would you recommend instead, but related in some way? Enemy, and The Den.
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Sep 10, 2016 08:00
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I thought this was...ok. Mostly great visuals (I ache for an anamorphic lens - 2.35:1 without barrel distortion sucks), good performances all around, the 70s atmosphere didn't feel as abrasive or cartoony as American Hustle, but the themes were so thudding and repetitive and "surreal societal breakdown" is old ground. I would've loved to have seen some more playful, incisive writing, like a Peter Greenaway film - people needed to be cutting each other with words, but none of the dialogue really stung. It would've also been nice to have seen more of an impact from the building itself, like Exterminating Angel, but instead it was just about the animal cruelties hidden in us all, even !!!bland suburbanites!!! (the horror).
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Sep 18, 2016 19:55
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I really liked it, from beginning to end. I got more of a Cronenberg vibe of it than anything, and it'd make a good double feature with Slither.
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Sep 23, 2016 20:30
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Regarding "why don't they just leave?" I feel like I watched an entirely different movie than the rest of you. Close to the beginning, when Laird is coming home from work, he's moving upstream against hordes of people who are doing just that. The parking lot is abandoned because what we see in the last third of the movie are feral holdouts wholly devoted to their status in the high-rise, whether that status is "oppressed" or "hedonist." Make no mistake: several long shots of the complex show that just beyond the ~5 sq. mi. parking lot, there are trees and suburbs. The outside world is fine and the holdouts love being placed in boxes. I also got a way more political bent out of it, and the sardonic Thatcher quote at the end only really served to cement my inability to suspend my disbelief throughout the movie: this all could have been alleviated (read: the building should have been condemned) had more people called the cops or had Royal hired public services like, I don't know, trash pickup. But instead, he was too devoted to his social experiment, and the characters too devoted to the allegory put forth by the film. Definitely a flawed movie, but I loved it regardless.
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Sep 29, 2016 19:33
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Cliche thing to say, but I enjoyed the novel a lot more. The movie had a lot of flaws and I don't think it was a great adaptation. Ballard may overexplain things, but they're at least usually in the author's narration or character's thoughts whereas in the film they're often made actual spoken out loud speech which comes out clunky and way too confiding or openly philosophizing for the characters. I understand that therein lies the difficulty of adapting a novel like this, but I just don't think they did a very good job of it. I would have preferred them keeping some of the inner narration like they had in the beginning, at least compared to just flatout having the characters say the poo poo to each other. A lot of that stuff I'd rather they omitted or tried to convey with the themes of the film rather than just jam them in some character's throat. Nice visuals and cast though, and some decent bits. Like something like this that might work in the novel because it's not actually being spoken out loud, in the film it would just get jammed into a character's dialogue and it comes off as clunky and pretentious. Especially when it was never even a thought of the character or involved with them. quote:A new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere. This was the sort of resident who was content to do nothing but sit in his over-priced apartment, watch television with the sound turned down, and wait for his neighbours to make a mistake. Punkin Spunkin fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Oct 11, 2016 |
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Oct 11, 2016 19:14
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The movie was as bad as the book. Unsubtle sums it up quite nicely, though perhaps contrived does the job better. It's just so unbelievable, whether as rich vs poor, or as humanity giving into capitalism. It's one big metaphor, and so there is nothing to hold it together. As someone else mentioned, Ballard over does the exposition, explaining his cleverness every other page. The movie is like the book in this way, but overplays the grand metaphor more unapologetically, and then throws in weird 'art house' editing and design on top. the_homemaster fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Oct 18, 2016 |
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Oct 18, 2016 21:03
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I just watched High-Rise. Great performances, wonderful visuals, but it fell really flat for me. I think making it a period piece was a mistake. The book wasn't a period piece, it was just written in the 70s. But the movie has this meter-deep thick veneer of fake 70s. It raised the baseline level of weirdness so that nothing in the movie felt weird. Stuff like the fairy tale garden on the roof, or the party where everybody is wearing the crazy powdered wigs didn't stand out, because they were surrounded by cartoon 70s fashion
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Jan 23, 2017 02:24
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