Alexander Payne + Clooney + Hawaii = The Descendants

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.

this one felt a little too amorphous and undefined, i guess is what i am saying. there were moments when the filmmakers seem to have realized this and telegraphed certain points in a very didactic way. but the whole thing didn't feel very integrated.

xpost

but y'know maybe if everything WAS tied together more neatly i'd be complaining about that.

i mean, you know what's a recent indie film that was a film à thèse? away we fucking go. and that was one of the worst films i've ever sat through.

(I'll say it for the last time, but, guys, if The Cherry Orchard ever plays your town. save your money. That thing has all of these identical problems.)

Someone just sent me the screenplay.

who feels, for unexplained reasons, to do the right thing,

maybe not in the eyes of those impoverished indigenous Hawaiian relations, eh

I hated this film, but didn't those "impoverished indigenous Hawaiian relations" impoverish themselves? And Clooney's character was as "indigenous" as the rest of them

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.

i should note that i only saw like 7 movies released this year.

were they impoverished or just sort of layabouts, surviving on declining trust funds?

yeah, Clooney says at the start that they all basically frittered away their money

i found this quite touching!

last scene of cloons on the couch w/ his daughters is cuet def, overall its ok, p good

it wasnt... what I was expecting

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?

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Tuesday, January 24, 2012 7:00 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

felt like clooney was just fed up w/the half ass corruption that comprised p much his whole life

george clooney runs in shoes!

^^ still hilarious

http://carpetbagger.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/27/making-the-descendants-funny-and-de-funnying-it-too/

**spoiler**

Q.
Were there any scenes that you thought were really funny that you had to cut because they were too funny?

A.
Mr. Faxon: There’s a scene at the end of the movie where they’re spreading the mother’s ashes in the ocean, and it gets broken up by a cruise and a bunch of drunk guys. That was shot, it was funny. But they didn’t want to cut away from that very poignant emotional closure.

i found it quite touching but i was on my 4th beer.

Clooney's final scene with his wife is the phoniest thing i've seen in a while

Watching Clooney cry is like watching George W. Bush read a children's book.

yeah that was by far the worst bit of the film

that's why it's his OSCAR CLINCHER

Oscar statuette, sobbing, to Dr. Morbius: "Finally, someone who understands me!"

i want to hear gr8080's take on this

― PEDAL TO THE METAL GRANDAD parp parp (remy bean), Friday, November 18, 2011 9:35 AM (2 months ago)

i finally saw this!

everyone in Hawaii can't stop talking about how OTM they get what Hawaii is really like, and I def agree. it's more than a little weird that the first hollywood film to accurately depict modern day hawaii has so few non-whites, but its def a real part of Honolulu society-- right down to the "ocean club" they belong to (irl its the Canoe club, and as exclusive as an average country club).

i havent liked anything payne's done since election, and this wasnt anywhere near the best thing I've seen lately but I was legit moved at times.

was louis ck actually approached for this? that would have been awesome, but i enjoyed the cloonster.

need to know if DLH saw this yet

i felt like a learnt something about what it's like to live in a place i know nothing about, so i'm glad to hear it wasn't all nonsense.

i felt like a learnt something about what it's like to live in a place i know nothing about,

being the boat shoe in which George Clooney sticks his foot.

i was wearing boat shoes when i saw it.

I'm now semi-convinced Clowney will lose Oscar to French guy's teeth

As now-film-pundit Bret Easton Ellis tweets:
As I predicted in my December 3rd 2011 tweet: "The Artist" will win the Oscar for best picture, best director and best actor.

saw this in the theater with my mom. she was an absolute wreck during the ashes scene (she had done likewise with her mothers ashes two years ago) (plus tit took place where her and my dad - long since divorced - had their honeymoon).
might have been a mistake to take her to this one.

i thought it was a quality movie, but Clooney - last scene with his wife especially - felt a pretty flat.

i still haven't seen it but yeah my hawaii friends like it too, are relieved that someone finally put a recognizable version of non-waikiki-theme-park hawaii in a movie, etc.. plus my mom liked it. even just the trailer Looked Like Hawaii; the power lines against the sky and the roadside foliage and the slick leaves and everybody's clothes reminded me of the movies i made in high school (which were, haha, not set in hawaii). when i see it i'll post.

spoiler: the only big island scenes are at night, but there are a few shots of coral graffiti on the kaahumanu highway at dusk

Those shots are actually extreme close-ups of George Clooney's bare left sole.

coral graffiti on the kaahumanu highway at dusk

man last time i was visiting w/ my gf i almost suggested we make some of this, which i've never done. next time. sometime.

This movie was weak sauce. Up In The Air (Clooney) was better.

The Artist wasn't that good either.

I can kinda feel like I'm choking up at a couple sad scenes but that doesn't make a movie

otm but this was def better than up in the air

it was p good imho, not w/flaws but def had some level of insight going on

the thing I guess I thought was interesting abt it was the take on ripening karma, like all the things he attempted to ignore for so long came back at him and there wasnt really anything he could do abt it, he had to deal w/it, he was trapped by circumstance, it wasnt just an emotional reality