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 i'm thinking of ending things is the new film from writer/director Charlie Kaufman. If you're familiar with his work, this could be characterized as "more of that." It is based on a book of the same title that I have not read. Apparently some things have been changed for the film adaptation, in case that sort of thing angers or excites you. It stars Jesse Plemmons, an imperfect clone of late actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Jesse Buckley (pictured above), who I was not familiar with prior to this film. I thought this film was quite good. It is available to watch on Netflix. Please feel free to share your thoughts on the film below. note: I would recommend avoiding the trailer for this if you plan to watch it General Dog fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Sep 8, 2020 |
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Sep 8, 2020 19:04
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The trailer definitely gives you a different idea about what the movie is about than what it's really about.
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Sep 8, 2020 19:11
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marshmallow creep posted:The trailer definitely gives you a different idea about what the movie is about than what it's really about. I thought it actually disclosed too much of the actual tone, but maybe that was just with the benefit of already having seen the movie. Regardless, it includes some moments that I'm glad I didn't see in advance.
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Sep 8, 2020 19:15
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Oh yeah, the tone is there, but I got the impression this was a (spoilering to try and not give things away to anyone who hasn't seen it) some kind of sci fi film, or rather that if it was a psychological film, it was the narrator's psychology in a Jacob's Ladder kind of way. I have not seen other Kaufman films to my knowledge, so maybe knowing more about him would have changed that.
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Sep 8, 2020 19:33
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marshmallow creep posted:I have not seen other Kaufman films to my knowledge Christ, fix that immediately.
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Sep 8, 2020 19:35
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I posted a lot of words about it in the streaming thread, but this film hit me really hard for a ton of reasons. I know a lot of people who read the book didn't dig the ending, what were people's impressions who went in cold?
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Sep 8, 2020 19:51
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Famethrowa posted:I posted a lot of words about it in the streaming thread, but this film hit me really hard for a ton of reasons. I thought the bit on stage at the very end was a bit much, but getting some context after the fact about the song that's performed makes me like it more. Up until then I was all in on everything at the school.
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Sep 8, 2020 19:59
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Don't do it OP! edit: misread
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Sep 9, 2020 07:08
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I watched this entire thing without realizing the metaphor or whatever I feel like a dumb rear end in a top hat. I suspected the Janitor was the young male for a second but the resemblance wasn't there for me.
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Sep 9, 2020 08:10
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Famethrowa posted:I know a lot of people who read the book didn't dig the ending, what were people's impressions who went in cold?
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Sep 9, 2020 11:42
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I feel like you're meant to have a very specific epiphany at a very specific point in this movie, which I kind of missed the boat on and that made the ending feel jumbled. There's an awful lot thrown at you in the last act. In retrospect, now that I know what was actually going on, it all makes sense, but it bums me out that it didn't land for me the first time through. The use of Oklahoma! is so interesting - in essence, Jake is casting himself as both the (questionably) heroic Curly and the vicious, obsessive Jud. In Oklahoma's dream ballet, Laurey fantasizes about being with Curly first, and then Jud invades and murders him. In this film, Jake imagines his younger self as Curly in the ballet, and his older self as Jud - his future self murdering his past self, essentially, either in the sense that he's letting go, or maybe in the sense that he takes responsibility and blame for everything that he didn't do. He then imagines his younger self having gone on a different road to become a successful, beloved person, and that version then sings Lonely Room, which is...Jud's song, a piece that is meant to complicate the audience's view of Jud by giving him a sympathetic depth, which comes right after a song in which Curly tells Jud that he should kill himself (!) because nobody likes him. Jake wants to be both the hero, loved for being successful, and the pitied, misunderstood martyr, which is incredibly sad and also horribly pertinent to the current political atmosphere. Also I love that the two lead actors have the same first name.
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Sep 9, 2020 17:10
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Loved it. This movie really hosed with me, for whatever reason the first quarter had me the most tense and on edge, but having had many awkward farmhouse dinners and having spent probably too much of my life inside my own head the whole thing was a stab in the gut. Big caveat, I had glimpsed some spoilers in the streaming thread that piqued my interest so I don't know how I would have reacted going in completely blind, even if I didn't get what what was truly going on initially still. Enjoyed when the girlfriend started insulting "A Woman Under the Influence" and picked up new mannerisms and affectations. At the time I was like "Oh, she's going into Critic Mode", but afterwards realized he read/saw a review once that trashed a movie he liked and it's been eating him up ever since. I wonder, is the titular "I'm thinking of ending things" supposed to be the janitor thinking of ending his life? That seems to be the most popular take, I read it as even in his fantasy he's not letting himself keep a happy relationship going
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Sep 9, 2020 17:27
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The scene where the janitor asks her to describe Jake is incredible.
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Sep 9, 2020 17:36
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Oh also Jake's dad quotes "Wouldn't It Be Loverly" from My Fair Lady, which is about a pompous tool who falls in love with the lower-class woman he gives dictation lessions to, but is frustrated by the fact that she acts independently of his desires after helping her rise in social rank.
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Sep 9, 2020 18:02
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I also like the stuff that's touched on as media as virus, which ends up being a pretty deep-running theme. Jake's projected ideal lady friend and Jake himself are little more than an accumulation of media and literary influences, to the point where the distinction between their own thoughts and works and those that they've absorbed becomes confused.
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Sep 9, 2020 18:09
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The Chad Jihad posted:Enjoyed when the girlfriend started insulting "A Woman Under the Influence" and picked up new mannerisms and affectations. At the time I was like "Oh, she's going into Critic Mode", but afterwards realized he read/saw a review once that trashed a movie he liked and it's been eating him up ever since.
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Sep 9, 2020 18:36
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Magic Hate Ball posted:Oh also Jake's dad quotes "Wouldn't It Be Loverly" from My Fair Lady, which is about a pompous tool who falls in love with the lower-class woman he gives dictation lessions to, but is frustrated by the fact that she acts independently of his desires after helping her rise in social rank. I caught that one, which made me start to cotton on to the game Kaufman was playing. Definitely didn't think about the Oklahoma connection though. I'm still in awe of the fact that 60-70% of the movie is fairly static car shots, yet I found it hard to walk away even just to grab a beer from the fridge.
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Sep 9, 2020 19:07
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Loved it. Even better on rewatch. I went in completely cold, didn't even watch the trailer because I was going to watch it regardless. It also gave me an excuse to rewatch Synecdoche, New York.
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Sep 10, 2020 03:08
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So, I posted in the Horror thread about about seeing it through a trans lens. Essentially, the Janitor doesn't just dream of having the young woman, but being the young woman. Here was my evidence for backing that up: Timeless Appeal posted:
Timeless Appeal fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Sep 10, 2020 |
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Sep 10, 2020 04:00
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Timeless Appeal posted:
That's a really cool interpretation that I think holds up pretty well! It gives the ending of the movie some hope as the car driving off in the final 5 seconds, possibly driven by Lucy, could represent him emerging from his snowy cocoon as fully transitioned. Also brings "Being John Malkovich" to mind, which had some pretty explicit trans and non-binary themes. Famethrowa fucked around with this message at 14:36 on Sep 10, 2020 |
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Sep 10, 2020 14:33
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A story like this gets more boring and cliche the more you lean on "these are avatars of the same person" or w/e, which is why I don't find this interpretation very compelling.
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Sep 10, 2020 17:44
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I mean that's the text regardless, isn't it? The Young Woman, the Ice Cream Clerk, Jake, and the Janitor being at some level the same person is just literally what's happening in the movie. I don't think that part of the movie is really obtuse. I think the question become what does that truth reveal about the characters.
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Sep 10, 2020 18:34
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Timeless Appeal posted:So, I posted in the Horror thread about about seeing it through a trans lens. Essentially, the Janitor doesn't just dream of having the young woman, but being the young woman. I'd be more convinced if the Young Woman actually had an identity to be seen as the janitor's alternate self. Sometimes she's a physicist, sometimes she's a virologist, and sometimes she's Pauline Kael. Sometimes she grew up in an apartment, sometimes she grew up in a farm. She doesn't even have a consistent name. Jake also has some inconsistencies, like whether he was a child prodigy or a special needs kid, but they aren't as all encompassing as the Young Woman's. The house is always his house, the parents his parents. Really, she functions as an interlocutor for the janitor's own thoughts. While the movie is the janitor's fantasy, it's not his ideal. By interrogating the thoughts of this girl that would hypothetically dump him he's exploring what he doesn't like about himself. In that sense, you're absolutely right that the Young Woman represents an aspect of his personality. Indeed, I think there's something to the idea that he's exploring some aspect of his own masculine and feminine features. Part of the reason he wants a girlfriend to begin with may be to have a complement with whom to share his more fanciful interests. However, I don't think that brings it quite far enough to a trans allegory, at least to me.
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Sep 10, 2020 21:34
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pospysyl posted:I'd be more convinced if the Young Woman actually had an identity to be seen as the janitor's alternate self. Sometimes she's a physicist, sometimes she's a virologist, and sometimes she's Pauline Kael. Sometimes she grew up in an apartment, sometimes she grew up in a farm. She doesn't even have a consistent name. Jake also has some inconsistencies, like whether he was a child prodigy or a special needs kid, but they aren't as all encompassing as the Young Woman's. The house is always his house, the parents his parents.
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Sep 11, 2020 01:46
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Is there any significance to the varnish smell? I don't remember if that was ever explained.
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Sep 13, 2020 15:20
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Spermando posted:Is there any significance to the varnish smell? I don't remember if that was ever explained.
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Sep 14, 2020 03:35
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General Dog posted:I also like the stuff that's touched on as media as virus, which ends up being a pretty deep-running theme. Jake's projected ideal lady friend and Jake himself are little more than an accumulation of media and literary influences, to the point where the distinction between their own thoughts and works and those that they've absorbed becomes confused. I really latched onto this stuff! Jake (I think?) references Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, but I also thought of Baudrillard's hyperreality in which symbols triumph over meaning. Color does not exist in nature but is just a mechanism of interpretation by our brains that in a way, gets in between us and the physical world, just like our society and culture of signs, symbols, media and commodities does. Jake never truly perceives the world around him, only the distortion of reality filtered through the books he's read and movies he's seen. Film criticism takes the voice of Pauline Kael and a lifetime of achievement is imagined like A Beautiful Mind. As he gets older, the representations of reality fully engulf his mind and blind him to actual reality and the movie turns into dance sequences, musicals, and cartoon ad jingles. But the thing I connected with even more is the subtler effects earlier in the movie. When the two of them are at his parent's house, each new scene comes crashing into the one before it and brings with it a different tone and a different storytelling and cinematic style, along with their respective archetypes. Meaning and narratives from previous scenes, such as the ominous warnings about the basement, become recontextualized and some of them discarded altogether. It reminds me of the way that we are constantly forming a narrative about our lives and the world around us, using shorthand cribbed from the media we've consumed, until a new experience or piece of information contradicts our story. When things don't quite add up, a voice inside tells us we must be imagining things, or we simply drank too much wine at dinner.
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Sep 14, 2020 07:10
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If it weren't for Portrait of a Lady on Fire, this would be my favorite film of 2020. Here's a really nice interview with Charlie Kaufman about the film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQ8gSZN7viE
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Sep 15, 2020 17:54
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The Chad Jihad posted:Loved it. This movie really hosed with me, for whatever reason the first quarter had me the most tense and on edge, but having had many awkward farmhouse dinners and having spent probably too much of my life inside my own head the whole thing was a stab in the gut. Big caveat, I had glimpsed some spoilers in the streaming thread that piqued my interest so I don't know how I would have reacted going in completely blind, even if I didn't get what what was truly going on initially still. It's not just critic mode, it's a really funny pauline kael impersonation. there's a copy of a kael book on his bookshelf in the scene just before this which iirc contains the essay those lines are taken from. edit: fenix down posted:I read that it's Pauline Kael's review from the book on top of his shelf. oh, beaten. but anyway yeah during the very first conversation in the car Jake speaks from the perspective of the Janitor when talking about his memories of seeing kids perform oklahoma and then grow older and seeing them around town etc. It's a "twist" in the book but not really in the film at all. Famethrowa posted:I caught that one, which made me start to cotton on to the game Kaufman was playing. Definitely didn't think about the Oklahoma connection though. The aspect ratio does a lot to sell those car scenes as claustrophobic and uncomfortable, and accentuates Jake's aversion to physical contact DeimosRising fucked around with this message at 21:41 on Sep 23, 2020 |
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Sep 23, 2020 21:35
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Timeless Appeal posted:So, I posted in the Horror thread about about seeing it through a trans lens. Essentially, the Janitor doesn't just dream of having the young woman, but being the young woman. Hey! I just wanted to say that this is a really interesting reading of the film and I'm glad you posted it.
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Sep 30, 2020 04:22
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Hey sorry for resurrecting this thread, my wife and I (and a friend via WhatsApp) just finally watched this last night and I wanted to nth that Timeless Appeal's reading was really interesting and added a lot of things to think about. I was initially super wary of the movie since I felt like "oh it's all in this old guy's head" was a lame twist and weirdly telegraphed, but what made it infinitely more interesting -- especially the more I thought about it after watching -- was how it used that framework to explore his life, his wasted dreams, him as a multi-faceted person, etc pospysyl posted:I'd be more convinced if the Young Woman actually had an identity to be seen as the janitor's alternate self. Sometimes she's a physicist, sometimes she's a virologist, and sometimes she's Pauline Kael. Sometimes she grew up in an apartment, sometimes she grew up in a farm. She doesn't even have a consistent name. Jake also has some inconsistencies, like whether he was a child prodigy or a special needs kid, but they aren't as all encompassing as the Young Woman's. The house is always his house, the parents his parents. Adding to what Timeless Appeal said but also I feel like the fact that not only did she have various jobs but they were mostly jobs that Jake himself wanted just add to the idea that she was not an idealized self but more specifically represented possibilities. I'm not Trans myself so I hope I'm not talking out of my rear end here but I feel like the changing names could also lend to this reading, i.e. that her name isn't set because he could choose from any name and just hasn't decided. As Jake his name and history is set, there is some stuff that shifts like you mentioned but that's mostly a matter of perspective (his special needs being seen as alternately something unique to be celebrated or shameful) whereas the young woman represented all the things he could have been.
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Jan 3, 2021 19:10
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thanks for bumping this thread now i have the entire soundtrack to oklahoma stuck in my head again
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Jan 5, 2021 15:20
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