The Movie/Film Thread

[karateexplosion]

Wes Anderson is the definition of overrated.

[deadgrandma]

Overrated? Hardly... I don't know anyone that mentions him or perhaps have even heard of him in general (apart from the other nerds I talk with on the internet). I've never heard anyone say "OH WOW LET'S GO WATCH THE NEW WES ANDERSON". Though, I imagine laughing at that. Maybe it's different in the states.

However, I bet if he was Japanese, some people would be up in arms about him on here :-p

He's alright, I like his stuff. Fantastic Mr. Fox was great.

[TurtleFu]

Speaking of Wes Anderson:
Some of you (I think Jihad?) have talked about how a work of art's meaning to you personally matters more than it's objective quality. In the case of the Royal Tenenbaums, I have to agree.
I was in a really bad place when I first saw that movie (it was on TV). I wasn't depressed, it was more like a grey funk. I was having kind of a teenage existential crisis mixed in with family and school problems. Anyways, I saw it, and for some reason it freaked me out. It actually made me more depressed, which lasted for a couple of days. Then I did something stupid. I got the DVD and a portable DVD player and watched the movie (the whole thing) while taking a bath. You know, like Gwyneth Paltrow's character in the film. And then I felt better, better than I was before I watched the movie the first time. So, it kind of helped me reassess my life's situation and fix some of my problems, and it is very important to me, as a person, even if it is not objectively perfect or overrated as a film, because it means something to me, which is better than it just being "good".

[deadgrandma]

I don't think we saw the same movie.

I liked it, but for other reasons, like Gene Hackman's bastard character

[Nimh]

Nolan can't direct. He can write and mount a production. Well, okay, he can't write women. Certainly can't direct them, or anyone/anything else.

PRESTIGE was okay, I guess. Good, mean script.

Anyway, right now I'm watching Chinmage Purin (A Boy and His Samurai), with Tomosaka Rie (looking hot in her office lady outfits) which has the unbelievably cute concept of a samurai opping up in modern-day Toyko to become a househusband for a single mom.

[TurtleFu]

@grandma
Like I said, I like it for very personal reasons. I recognize the film has flaws, but that doesn't matter to me. You can't possibly compare your critical view of the film to my personal relationship with it. I don't expect you to have liked it for the same reasons, because you aren't me.

@Nimh
You and I are going to be good friends here

[Tokyo Jihad]

I dunno Nimh, you sound alot like an idiot there

[zombiestrip]

Originally Posted by Nimh

Nolan can't direct.

Can you elaborate? Not singling you out or anything, it's just a rather blunt statement.

Originally Posted by Nimh

Anyway, right now I'm watching Chinmage Purin (A Boy and His Samurai), with Tomosaka Rie (looking hot in her office lady outfits) which has the unbelievably cute concept of a samurai opping up in modern-day Toyko to become a househusband for a single mom.

Hopefully seeing that movie here when the Japanese Film Festival in Melbourne rolls around. Looks like it could be a fun movie to kill time with. Had no idea Tomosaka Rie was in it. I just liked the silly concept.

[Nimh]

Originally Posted by zombiestrip

Can you elaborate? Not singling you out or anything, it's just a rather blunt statement.

Gladly. Where should we start? Inception?

Dream-theme: already covered in the superior thriller Dreamscape, Nightmare on Elm Street, and various David Lynch films. The fact that you can enter a person's dreams to experience his/her unconscious desires and somehow alter that person's waking reality has been done, much better, previously, often. Nothing original, and Nolan has nothing new to add to it, except over-elaborating the dream-within-a-dream concept, which could have had a crazy kick a la Being John Malkovich but instead is made ponderous and laborious. D.W. Griffith invented cross-cutting between four parallel narratives in 1916's Intolerance and Nolan doesn't improve on that 100-year-old movie one bit. The fact that everything hinges on a guy's sentimental attachment to a child's toy is supposed to be, I guess, an ironic musing on how little things implanted in our subconscious lead to great historical events, but because Nolan has no sense of humor and only a leaden, literary approach to irony, by the end of the movie the only emotion he can evoke is relief that the damn thing is finally over, mixed with frustration that he couldn't wrap it up with anything but a clever "explanatory" coda that to him might have been on the level of Citizen Kane but for the rest of us seems like a useless afterthought.

Women: here I'll bounce around the films he's done so far. The female of Leo's dreams is a psycho-bitch; the female of his reality is a young wonk who delivers nothing but exposition (and a cute moment with JGL that is thrown away like most everything else that's pleasurable in a Nolan film). The females of the Batman movies are either victims or disposable cheesecake. The female of Insomnia is a young wonk who becomes a victim. The female of Guy Pearce's dreams in Memento is a victim; the female of his reality is a psycho-bitch. Seeing a pattern? In Nolan's world, women are psychos, tomboy wonks, or victims. Basically a male adolescent fantasy.

Action: Good God, he cannot direct an action scene. Don't take my word for it, go to this video essay at http://blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay...istopher_Nolan
...to see a visual breakdown of Nolan's inability to shoot an action scene. He cannot frame or edit shots in a way that establishes a continuity of action, and as Inception proved, he cannot cross-cut between multiple continuities with any descernible logic or rhythm.

Storytelling: You can forgive a director for shoddy action choreography (you can blame it on the second unit) or immature conceptions of women (puts him in company with Peckinpah and Oliver Stone) or mediocre symbolism, but you can't overlook, especially when the director writes most of his scripts, an incredible handicap when it comes to getting across basic story information. In a Nolan movie, things happen without consequence, and important things happen without us seeing it. His way of telling the story is to put it all in the characters' mouths. The characters don't talk like people, they talk like they're at an academic seminar explaining the movie to you as you're watching it. It's not so much a failed effort at storytelling, it's simple laziness. Why go through the trouble of creating a character like the Joker, and why have an actor go insane trying to give this character some personality, when everything is explained in turgid dialogue passages like "I'm a function of chaos" or "He just wants to see the world burn" or some stupid shit like that? First rule of storytelling: don't tell, show. Nolan fails at that. He'll also bump off important characters offscreen, or introduce a character just to bump him off, or direct a scene where you're not even sure whether or not someone got bumped off.

I can go on, but that's enough for now.

Basically, he makes movies for male adolescents who need reassurance that their comic-book fueled fantasies of the world are actually sophisticated templates of contemporary thought.

[Tokyo Jihad]

You sound like every film student trying desperately to impress his peers by adopting some saucy, "too cool" weakly stilted opinion.

Weakly stilted in spite of all that text.

For someone whose posts are always so holier than thou, your posts are always so pet-ish/fanboyish.

To say "he can't direct." is just asinine. Sure he's not Kubrik, but for mainstream Hollywood directors, to find markedly better would be the few and the elite. Parroting the same Internet Cool Guy arguments (that have already been discussed) just makes you sound as much of an adolescent needing reassurance as those who you look down upon for liking Nolan movies (Heaven's to betsy!) Sure, Nolan depicted dreams differently than Michel Gondry, but he made his creative choice, reinforced it, and ran with it. It's like being upset that there wasn't more slapstick in Citizen Kane or that they didn't hook up at the end of Casablanca. (Excuse me for comparing Inception with Kane and Casablanca; they are just easy references. )

As said before if you really lost track of who the good guy, the bad guy were, and what was at stake in any of his action scenes I can't help but wonder if you were looking at the screen the entire time. If you really want incoherent action scenes, I invite you to check out Transformers 2. As for the tired ass female character arguments, you gotta just think it is a bigger indictment of Hollywood at large. The protagonist is usually gonna be a dude, and he fairly often is going to have some intra-personal ghost or conflict -- which is either going to be a lady or his dad. Can't blame Nolan for not rewriting Batman's backstory, or making Inception less interesting.

Who knows though, maybe these hip cool reasons why "popular director" really sucks gets you more invites to obscure B-horror movie vhs book-clubs.