Alexander Payne + Clooney + Hawaii = The Descendants

Syriana

Unless nail-devoid hipster of the state is a look now.

well, "looked this bad" in the heteronormative Oscar-nom way, you mean.

I think he's a toadstool with good skin and hair products.

Clooney likes to play slovenly or humiliated, in those mentioned and Intolerable Cruelty (prob my fave role of his after Out of Sight).

He peaked early, then.

http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kzclccCKzS1qbs6n7o1_400.jpg

who's the pretty girl on the left?

Kristy McNichol

lookit the gel glistening!

did not find much to take away from this movie. i think i was immediately turned off since literally everyone in the movie was kind of an asshole, and im not really sure making someone act that way is really a substitute for a convincing character.

oh and the boyfriend character was the cheapest gimmick ever that you can see coming miles away. kinda typifies the glib approach of the movie.

george clooney runs in shoes!

― occupy the A train (difficult listening hour)

^^^ best ilx post of 2011

Erudite white people suffering domestic strife in Hawaii.

Well, yeah, but, other than location, The Cherry Orchard and Uncle Vanya fit this description as well. And all of them have a land auction, too.

Enjoyed it.

boy this really ladles it on, especially towards the end. thought the running in flipflops was funny tho

I enjoyed this. My only real complaint was the casting of Clooney.

i liked this well enough when i saw it, but even at the time i had to sort of artificially muster up for enthusiasm than i felt in my heart or whatever. after a few weeks it's really fading on me. payne is a smart guy, and election is a minor classic, but i don't think this one really shows his talent that much TBH. the nicest way to put it, i suppose, is that this sort of thing isn't really my cup of tea. i guess there's still a little mileage in his old trick of taking a sentimental scene and sort of blowing it up with inappropriate humor, but even on this he seemed to kind of hedge. there's no way this is a "bad" movie, and the criticism of it as "white people problems" is dumb and lazy, but it wasn't really all that great either was it?

MORE enthuasism

damned typos.

HA

It's def not a great movie, but there are some scenes that I've kept revisiting in my mind since I saw this Saturday night. The scene with Woodley in the pool made my eyes tear up in 3 seconds. Also the boyfriend scene at the Princeville hotel really left an impression on me.

That said, I've only been able to make to the movies about 3 times in the last year, so what do I know.

yeah both of those played well when i was watching but when i think back i just envision this kind of clouded gray thing--nothing really pops out. but that's just me i guess.

there are definitely some great lines in this film, but i can't remember any of them. :)

You know, I like Payne, and I admit I haven't seen this one yet. But the guy showed such a searing, acid wit in "Citizen Ruth" and "Election" (which I think even he has admitted may be his only move where absolutely everything was just right). But from "About Schmidt" on it's all been variations on midlife crisis, no? I agree that "rich white people" is reductive and unfair to his subjects, but there's still something about his particular milieu that echoes the exclusivity of Woody Allen and Albert Brooks yet nonetheless continually falls short of the best of their particular skills. I know, good company to be in, but still.

rich white people vs overweight Dorito-eating Hawaiians.

Same class/crass issues as Vanya.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/07/15/theater/Vanya600.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvktSp2mHi4&feature=related

i was expected to dislike this but ended up having no real problem with it.

i think the 'rich ppl probs' angle is just backwards, esp the charge that it effaces the real racial character of hawaii. the movie is about the narrow class of people who did exactly that. their whiteness and indolent wealth hangs over the whole damn thing. i thought it was all hyper class- and privilege-aware. clooney has to say it aloud when he's making his final decision: "we're haole as shit". what does the one cousin say when he takes them to see the land in his jeep, "i got nothin' but time". lucky him.

i guess there's still a little mileage in his old trick of taking a sentimental scene and sort of blowing it up with inappropriate humor

i think this is perceptive except that i dont find any mileage in it anymore, and i think basically the whole film (or at least the script) is comprised of these kinds of "tricks" that are supposed to elicit the idea of depth or "humanity" or somesuch. i wasnt really buying. have nothing against privileged white people, but i did find almost everyone in this movie unpleasant.

I found the pool scene immature. Wit should deflect bathos but in this movie Payne's attempts actually abetted the bathos.

Robert Forster shd've punched everyone in the face

i think this is tied w/ Ides of March for worst movie i saw this year. like, Ides was obv "worse" but i still hated this so much

dude if those are the worst movies you saw this year, i envy you. seriously. there were some seriously horrible movies in wide release this year.

Relative to the quality of its "ideas" and critical response this is as dreadful as Beginners.

If Beginners had fifth-generation Bohemian Grove Californians as part of its story, maybe.

Relative to the quality of its "ideas" and critical response this is as dreadful as Beginners.

― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, January 24, 2012 5:59 PM (26 minutes ago)

this is kinda your problem rather than the film's, no?

what's the difference? If I see those problems, then it's the film's.

also that post doesn't quite parse. are you saying it seems to bat around big ideas that aren't interesting? that's kind of how i read your post, even though that isn't what you actually wrote.

Yes, that's what I meant. Sorry about the confusion.

what's the difference? If I see those problems, then it's the film's.

― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, January 24, 2012 6:27 PM (2 minutes ago)

i mean you're bringing in a lot of extradiegetic baggage - not that the criticisms aren't fair, but for someone not immersed in the film crit hype cycle, they don't resonate as well

that a.o. scott review was so over the top that i just kind of purposely forgot it right away. i don't know what other critics were saying about this.

i felt it was just kind of "ok" in every category. funny ha-ha? a little. droll? a little. sad? a little. good acting? sure, i guess. smart direction? sort of.

it kind of lost some points for the opening vice-over, which didn't seem to serve any purpose or fit into the rest of the film tonally or thematically.

i mean i guess the point of the opening VO was to signal that this film would deal with hawaii as like a real place where people live and work and stuff, not a tourist's fantasy of hawaii. but the film itself made that point just fine -- the filmmakers didn't trust slow joe in the back row to grasp that, i guess? i felt condescended to.

i thought that was meant to be some kind of switcheroo or unreliable narrator thing (im not sure to what effect), because he gives you the spiel about how hawaii's not paradise and then for the rest of the movie it is shot so that it looks like freaking paradise, with clooney's family mostly living like laid back beach bums. i sure didnt come away from it feeling like i experienced the 'real' and gritty hawaii

what about the Hawaiians crunching on potato chips in the first ten minutes

i don't think it was patterned enough to be an unreliable narrator thing. it's just sloppiness. i mean you could say the film deals productively in the contrast between hawaii as a natural paradise and hawaii as a place people live and work. but the voice over made it seem like it would be a film à thèse or something, and it clearly wasn't. i'd have to see it again but i'm not sure the themes came through very clearly. again, it felt a bit sloppy in that regard, esp. compared to something like election.

i don't really like the word 'miscast' but yeah, i feel like the story this movie was trying to tell kind of got hid by clooney somehow. it's about a boring plodder who feels, for unexplained reasons, to do the right thing, and where that lands him. a long-sufferer w/o charisma. he says at the beginning he's the only one out of his lazy clan to have a real job and not blow it all (maybe this isn't quite true). i think you are meant to understand why the wife would be off having fun and falling for someone else, and why he would be clueless. it's hard to look at george c. and think this tho.

good point goole

yeah i'm not sure that anything in the movie clearly developed the process of him arriving at a decision re. his family's land. nor did we get a sense of what the broader social stakes of that decision were let alone what it might mean to the protagonist privately or what it had to do with his wife's impending death. maybe it's just subtle and i'd have to watch it again?

im imagining paul giamatti in the lead and the movie suddenly makes more sense

huh yeah it's kind of similar to win-win in a lot of ways, loved that movie

i mean a certain degree of fuzziness can be justified in terms of "real characters, messy real-life problems" but you know films are like 120 minutes long and they are like artworks and stuff, so they are most satisfying when you feel that the filmmakers have done their job and patterned the screenplay in ways where you can kind of weigh out and sift through the patterns productively during and after.

For this movie to be convincing it would have had to dig into the details of buying and selling land in a state that was once a protectorate, not to mention the landowners' shall we say complex relations with the natives; but lately nothing interests Alexander Payne but the quick sell, in this case George Clooney Cries in Boat Shoes.