What movies are you watching?

[lennytheweedwhacker]

Call Me By Your Name.

Beautifully shot. Chalamet was incredible. Pacing was a little slow and precious sometimes but I really enjoyed this.

I’d like to see this...love the sufjan songs from it

[Biff Pocoroba]

Call Me By Your Name.

Beautifully shot. Chalamet was incredible. Pacing was a little slow and precious sometimes but I really enjoyed this.

I’d like to see this...love the sufjan songs from it

I would have thought Lenny had already seen it.
Chalamet's very good, definitely his break through and completely acts circles around Armie Hammer. Other than The Social Network I have yet to see Hammer do anything that impresses me on screen with his acting skills.

[epilogue]

Odd. I’d think they’d be angry and offended.

why? I think being tired and doing all kinds of stuff while having a baby is pretty common. To have post delivery depression is also very common.

Yes but hallucinating a caretaker while putting up with your shitty husband and his even shittier brother feels like Reitman has really low expectations for women

Weird take. Even weirder that you fault Reitman for it and not Cody.

Given your take on Tully, what do you like about YA?

Real talk: It takes an extremely cynical look at a part of life that is obviously difficult and messy, but it refuses to acknowledge any of the joyful aspects of parenthood.

It makes some huge leaps in emotional logic — her husband sucks, his family sucks, yet she wants to fulfill a sex fantasy for him when he’s not playing video games.

Then it has this magical babysitter character who waltzes in and fixes everything with a golden touch. But it wraps the whole thing up with a gotcha twist that is contrived and doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny. It’s not like Fight Club where you can re-watch a scene and understand it better knowing that Mackenzie’s character isn’t real. There are whole chunks that just don’t make sense.

And guess what? At the end, she has to let go of the one person who showed her any support or empathy, and go back to her shitty husband.

It’s an angry, cynical movie disguised as a feminist empathy flick, made by a man who has a demented idea of what the postpartum experience is all about, who is mean to literally every single character in the movie, and who at the end tries to tell you that a good chunk of what you just watched was pure fantasy.

I think it’s a truly horrid piece of work, literally one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.

YA I’ll grant you is by no stretch a great flick, but I really enjoyed the friendship between Theron and Oswalt.

Our views on what the movie is (what it's trying to do and what it successfully accomplishes) are different. No big surprise there and your read of the movie makes a ton of sense to me given what little I know about you from your posts on RM. So fair enough.

But I'm still curious why Reitman is the main villain in this to you. How come the person who wrote the movie, who created the shitty characters in the angry, cynical film disguised as a feminist empathy flick, who designed the contrived plot devices, doesn't deserve more of your scorn and criticism?

And just to be clear, I think Tully is a C+ film at best. And I don't find what's good about it is good enough to warrant any kind of staunch defense. I don't think your take on the film is out of bounds. I happen to like it far more than Young Adult, though.

Both have interesting ideas that go unfulfilled or unrealized. Ditto Jagged Little Pill: The Musical (which is the only other thing I've seen that Diablo Cody as written). Each achieves varying levels of success but all are incomplete and exactly why I said earlier that I'm ready to say that I don't like Diablo Cody as a writer.

While I certainly have no interest in getting into the mud on the issue here on RM (for what should be SUPER obvious reasons) I do wonder if there are essays out there discussing the juxtaposition of the male critical lens and interpretation of female writing. If any of you are aware of such writings, hit me up. I'd love to read that shit.

[epilogue]

Call Me By Your Name.

Beautifully shot. Chalamet was incredible. Pacing was a little slow and precious sometimes but I really enjoyed this.

hundo-p

[lennytheweedwhacker]

Call Me By Your Name.

Beautifully shot. Chalamet was incredible. Pacing was a little slow and precious sometimes but I really enjoyed this.

I’d like to see this...love the sufjan songs from it

I would have thought Lenny had already seen it.
Chalamet's very good, definitely his break through and completely acts circles around Armie Hammer. Other than The Social Network I have yet to see Hammer do anything that impresses me on screen with his acting skills.

stfu

i generally like hammer

[tragabigzanda]

Whenever there's active promotion on the part of somebody else, whenever I see somebody all dolled up for a fancy photograph and someone's handing out flyers or whenever there's active promotion for something like that, as an imposition on my day, I hate all those people and I want them to fail. I have a visceral reaction to advertising and promotion. There's just something about salesmanship that grates on me on a very base level and I react very negatively towards it. I want those people to suffer and I want their enterprises to fail.

[epilogue]

Joe, I appreciate if you don’t want to do a deep dive, but would you at least be willing to tell me what you feel is the goal of the movie? What is the story is trying to tell, or what is the director trying to accomplish, if you think it is significantly different than my read?

The goal is tell a story that doesn't get told: that of a woman struggling with sever anxiety and postpartum depression. I think on that score, the film is incredibly successful. But like all things, there's more to it than my simple reductionist sentence.

I think the movie is far more nuanced and mature than you're giving it credit for. Having never gone through postpartum depression, I'm certainly not qualified to talk about how accurate the movie is. But I found that aspect very effecting. The fact that Cody wrote it after having her third child leads me to believe there is some real experience there. I think there are some profound moments. I think the characters are well drawn.

My guess is that the movie was trying to avoid real dumb "mommy-movie" tropes, which is does very successfully. Marlo is well drawn, she's a real woman without all the male fantasy or madonna/whore trappings that are common in all cinema, specifically in cinema about motherhood.

To me, Drew isn't as much a shitty guy as he is a pretty articulate and honest portrayal of most detached husbands/fathers who have zero clue what their partners are going through and are far too ill-equipped to handle it even if they did know.

My read on the "male sex fantasy" scene, for example, is geared on Marlo, not Drew. It's so much more about her and her fantasy -- not having to do it all on her own but also feeling sexy and being present -- than it is about him or what he wants.

So, I guess the tl;dr version is that my take is largely opposite of yours.

[VinylGuy]

I agree with joey's view.
I wasnt in love with the movie, and thought the twist was obvious, but i feel the representation of motherhood and depression could be accurate. Women responded with the movie too, and they were touched by it.
I dont think it has a cynical or pessimistic view at all.

It might be a difficult movie as a man to really get or judge.

[Mickey]

My take is that you're both fucking wrong.

[epilogue]

My take is that you're both fucking wrong.

[epilogue]

I agree with joey's view.
I wasnt in love with the movie, and thought the twist was obvious, but i feel the representation of motherhood and depression could be accurate. Women responded with the movie too, and they were touched by it.
I dont think it has a cynical or pessimistic view at all.

It might be a difficult movie as a man to really get or judge.

Yeah, for me, the biggest flaws in the film are the execution of the twist and the depth. There are so many great, moving, and interesting ideas/themes, I just wanted the movie to go even further. But the performances are wonderful and I think it's well shot. All of Reitman's strengths are in full display: characters, humor, pacing, simplicity, voice.

It was a good movie (slightly above average) that could have been a great film. It was more successful than not, though.

[epilogue]

Not that I think Jason Reitman is a brilliant filmmaker or anything. But going back to my initial question to trag, I think Reitman has elevated Cody's work more than she's elevated his.

Thank You For Smoking and Up In The Air are brilliant films.

[Mickey]

Okay but actually--I think Joe's right that the failures in Tully are primarily the failures of the writer. I honestly haven't thought about the direction that much, but it's that awful reversal at the end which really gets me, and I think that's squarely Cody's fault. I don't see a lot of value in psychoanalyzing the movie very much, whether or not it represents Cody's experience or isn't meant for men or whatever (FWIW my wife hated it as well, though that's about as convincing as "I have a black friend," so). But in general I agree with Trag that the reversal really trivializes a lot of the movie by painting the actual and crushing experience of postpartum as goofily psychotic, which makes it hard to sympathize with the idea that it's particularly sensitive to the lived reality. And I definitely agree with Trag that it just doesn't hold up to any scrutiny when you re-watch it as if there was only one person in the majority of the scenes (so maybe that's equally on Reitman and Cody). It's a weak conceit to begin with and the movie really doesn't pull it off.

[tragabigzanda]

Whenever there's active promotion on the part of somebody else, whenever I see somebody all dolled up for a fancy photograph and someone's handing out flyers or whenever there's active promotion for something like that, as an imposition on my day, I hate all those people and I want them to fail. I have a visceral reaction to advertising and promotion. There's just something about salesmanship that grates on me on a very base level and I react very negatively towards it. I want those people to suffer and I want their enterprises to fail.

[Mickey]

Bigger question: really confused as to how you can appreciate the maturity and nuance lurking in Tully and yet not like Young Adult, which is far and away a superior film.

[tragabigzanda]

Whenever there's active promotion on the part of somebody else, whenever I see somebody all dolled up for a fancy photograph and someone's handing out flyers or whenever there's active promotion for something like that, as an imposition on my day, I hate all those people and I want them to fail. I have a visceral reaction to advertising and promotion. There's just something about salesmanship that grates on me on a very base level and I react very negatively towards it. I want those people to suffer and I want their enterprises to fail.

[epilogue]

Okay but actually--I think Joe's right that the failures in Tully are primarily the failures of the writer. I honestly haven't thought about the direction that much, but it's that awful reversal at the end which really gets me, and I think that's squarely Cody's fault. I don't see a lot of value in psychoanalyzing the movie very much, whether or not it represents Cody's experience or isn't meant for men or whatever (FWIW my wife hated it as well, though that's about as convincing as "I have a black friend," so). But in general I agree with Trag that the reversal really trivializes a lot of the movie by painting the actual and crushing experience of postpartum as goofily psychotic, which makes it hard to sympathize with the idea that it's particularly sensitive to the lived reality. And I definitely agree with Trag that it just doesn't hold up to any scrutiny when you re-watch it as if there was only one person in the majority of the scenes (so maybe that's equally on Reitman and Cody). It's a weak conceit to begin with and the movie really doesn't pull it off.

Oh sure. My wife loved the movie (more than I did) and all of our female friends really related to it. I didn't mention any of that earlier because, as you say, it's as meaningful as "I have black friends." It's irrelevant. Obviously, people like or dislike things for a myriad reasons. That's not an all together interesting conversation to have.

I don't disagree with your (and trag's) largest points. The twist is disappointing. And, though, I haven't rewatched the movie since seeing it theaters on initial release, I do also suspect it doesn't have much replay value. But not in a "Fight Club" way, more in a "trite" or "shallow" way. As I said, I want Cody to drill down on her ideas more.

[Mickey]

Honestly I just want Cody to make Jennifer's Body sequels for the rest of her life.

[epilogue]

Bigger question: really confused as to how you can appreciate the maturity and nuance lurking in Tully and yet not like Young Adult, which is far and away a superior film.

Because it's all the same issues but with less underneath. And the people that populate the world are far less likable -- more importantly, they are far less nuanced or interesting.

[epilogue]

Honestly I just want Cody to make Jennifer's Body sequels for the rest of her life.

I guess I need to see it?