Red Mosquito

Anders wrote:Nightcrawler really was excellent. Easily a top ten movie from 2014.

Steve Albini wrote: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.

Anders wrote:Just watched the first five minutes of Birdman. I love that movie. Can’t wait to see it again, but it won’t be tonight.

Anders wrote:Just watched the first five minutes of Birdman. I love that movie. Can’t wait to see it again, but it won’t be tonight.

Anders wrote: The final rewatch I’ve got left for 2014 movies, is Birdman. Might watch that later this evening. Had a similar, but still more pleasant experience with that one. Saw it in the cinema with one of my best friends. Turned to her after the movie, said something like «wow, amazing movie, that will (or should) win the Academy award for best movie». She looked at me dumbfounded, and said that she really didn’t like it at all.

Jorge wrote:

Anders wrote: The final rewatch I’ve got left for 2014 movies, is Birdman. Might watch that later this evening. Had a similar, but still more pleasant experience with that one. Saw it in the cinema with one of my best friends. Turned to her after the movie, said something like «wow, amazing movie, that will (or should) win the Academy award for best movie». She looked at me dumbfounded, and said that she really didn’t like it at all.

I watched this with a group of friends at its Argentine premiere at the Mar del Plata Film Festival, before it had a wide release. None of us liked it, but I hated it with a burning passion. (To be fair, we watched it right after a screening of Fellini 8 1/2, so of course it was going to come off a certain kind of way)

I've softened on it over the years, especially since it has apparently become Cinephile Public Enemy #1, because I do think there's a lot to enjoy about it. It's a great acting showcase for everybody, and the filmmaking is fine. The writing is what the writing is (bad) but mostly I just want to tell everyone to relax about it. It's crazy that that's the movie that inspired passionate debate for so long.

tree_ wrote:joe can you please tell me what it was trying to say

BurtReynolds wrote:Rewatched Ad Astra. I liked it more this time, but man the script has some problems. Just too many dumb moments. it's a shame because otherwise it's pretty good.

6.5/10

lennytheweedwhacker wrote:

BurtReynolds wrote:Rewatched Ad Astra. I liked it more this time, but man the script has some problems. Just too many dumb moments. it's a shame because otherwise it's pretty good.

6.5/10

I thought it looked great. I see the issues, but overall I liked it a lot more than most dudes.

BurtReynolds wrote:

lennytheweedwhacker wrote:

BurtReynolds wrote:Rewatched Ad Astra. I liked it more this time, but man the script has some problems. Just too many dumb moments. it's a shame because otherwise it's pretty good.

6.5/10

I thought it looked great. I see the issues, but overall I liked it a lot more than most dudes.

It does look great.

Malloy wrote:

tree_ wrote:joe can you please tell me what it was trying to say

jorge and I disagreed on the film when it was released, and this is the pm i sent to him and alex when we were talking about it


j,

we totally agree on what Birdman's commitments are: the relation of art to authenticity (the film seems to be saying that the authentic is hard to get at for a variety of reasons, though mostly because of the pressures of capitalism and its attendant culture). jerome christensen writes somewhat persuasively on this tension, http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=20203, though his account isn't quite right. you should take a look at his reading of Batman Returns, which is interesting in light of the points inarritu seems to be making. i also bring up the book, and that chapter in particular, because of its relevance to a solution that Birdman gestures at. but i'll get to that a bit later.

back to dialogue and authenticity. so we agree on what the film means, but it seems we disagree in two ways about the ingenuity of how it means what it means. the first disagreement is the delivery of dialogue in the film, or its style. the second the dialogue's content. on the second point, i'd agree that the criticisms of the film aren't that interesting--we're narcissists hooked on our iphones, market pressures are fucking with art, authenticity is impossible in the age of global capital, criticism has become myopic and conservative. as you say, these aren't profound problems that the film locates ("navel-gazing faux profundity"). but the film does work to resolve or, at least, temporarily suspend them. and i find that resolution/suspension has to be taken as part of the film's content, of which the dialogue is one part, which then redeems it.

it's telling (of the film, not you) that the ultimate effect of inarritu's various monologues and soliloquies is "old man yells at cloud." there's a way in which i think that's deeply true. these attempts at obtaining authenticity or critiquing barriers to it are moot in the world we live in. the solution then seems to be the work of art, which purports to be nothing more than artifice. and Birdman is a film invested in displaying its own artifice, be it with clunky dialogue, the prodigious camera work (the camera passing through the window grill a la Antonioni), a stage adaptation of a short story that is infamous for being radically altered by its author's editor, etc. it's a lowercaser's wet dream. i really loved how unnaturalized the dialogue was, but only because of its relation to the content of the film (and the auto-critique inarritu was doing of his older films).

if the problem in art in 2015 is a certain desire for authenticity, Birdman becomes a solution by recalibrating arts relation to the real (this is after 30 years of conceptual, performance and installation art, not to mention language poetry and some photography, all of which worked to collapse the gap between life and art).