thread for Sean Baker since he allegedly doesn't belong in "ten greatest living American filmmakers" thread

Shots of hills for their own sake = Straub-Huillet's Sicilia!

It all varies for me, I mean there are prob films where I didn't give a shit about the characters or plot but walked away satisfied that it'd given me something to think about in terms of space. Or color, or politics or whatever. I found That Thing You Do basically enjoyable but mainly appreciated it, and think of it, as a study in how the addition of a good drummer turns a mediocre band into a great one. Good rock crit insight, well-told in a filmic way.

imo legitimate critique is that which makes the conversation more interesting. alfred more than passes the test; proclaiming flatly that he doesn't, doesn't.

― the pleather of pleather paul (Doctor Casino), 18. december 2017 16:17 (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's this idea that kinda... infuriates me. Film critique shouldn't be 'interesting' if it means it fails to be accurate. Which is not to say anything about Alfred, but it's an idea I see a lot. Taibbi also wrote recently that the worst thing an intellectual could do would be to fail to be 'interesting', and I disagree so much. It's much worse being wrong. And I'd say the idea that The Florida Project isn't doing anything with space and geography is simply wrong. So much of the film is told through architecture and buildings and space and weird angles.

While posting on here is not a test to be passed or failed (lol) in that shot there are no 'weird' angles. When I saw the youtube it seemed lazily framed (Straubs are a good ref ponint for this), like they are pleasant static shots but they are never held for long (the very first shot) and Baker doesn't repeat the trick after the kids buy ice-cream as the camera just follows what the kids are doing. Seems bored and yet the buildings have that character and grotesquery by which concentration on them could reveal more of their character. We are left not knowing. I don't think much is ever done with light or shadow either.

The best thing is the choice made to film the buildings in the first place but he isn't doing anything much at all with them.

Look at the curve of the pavement. He uses a wideangle lens and lets it distort the buildings. That is quite unusual. Look at the balloon to the right of the shot, while he shoots the shop straight on that still leaves the composition off kilter.

Fair enough, I saw the cut balloon to the right not the pavement so much - the problem, still, is he doesn't hold it for long enough. I really didn't see enough of these moments to build anything like a comment on what he was looking at.

Its not bad - just wouldn't go ape over it, in terms of its look.

Different strokes, but I very much go ape :) I love it, and I love that he just does it and then leaves it, if he held it too long it wouldn't work the same. It's not Ulrich Seidl, and I don't need it to be Ulrich Seidl. It's not about getting the character of the space, really letting it live, it's about creating a new space, a distorted, off kilter, unstable space. It's kinda ugly by design. Just like the final sequence wouldn't be so good if it wasn't done on ugly iPhone. One of the things I've noticed trying to write about Baker is that I can never find screenshots for my articles that are actually from the film, because the press office clearly 'cleans them up', so to speak.

Check this image, from his Starlet:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-SGkPrwCtpCk/UKeBiqDk1wI/AAAAAAAAD24/4hszoZk9mUs/s1600/starlet+8.jpg
It's the person sitting on the chair in the background, the fact that the electricity towers in fact aren't symmetrical, the interplay between things that are clearly well composed - the bench is placed right in the middle of the frame - and things that don't fit. I love that shit. I just absolutely love the cinematography of Sean Baker ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don't need it to be Ulrich Seidl, and yet for that shot to take more of an effect it could be slower. Except that could then fuck up with the rhythm in which the story is told. I never noticed the ugliness except as an aesthetic that is already in the place, but you could just capture it if you shot it straight.

i need to see Starlet

The visual aspect is where I actually do agree with Frederik, who is able to verbalize it better than I am.

Far more so here than in his last one, arguably.

yes and I do admire that composition he selected

lol yeah it looks great obv, maybe play it at 0.5 speed if you're not good at noticing stuff

i also like the exterior view of the motel's balconies and people on them... bcz it recalls Lewis's The Ladies Man.

unforch not as funny

frederik b mostly otm itt and mostly p chill when he gets attacked generally imo (caveat: I don't frequent the US politics threads)

Haters are just jealous at how much time Frederik B gets to dig deep into festival fodder.

lol I'm very unjealous of that myself

I grant some of the haters could just be miserable people.

Actually if I see it this again it will be on fast fwd.

Happy to be bitter.

Board description.

not sure i want to see the kids being MORE hyperactive tbh

i saw this last night. this movie has gone BIG in France; it's playing at pretty much every cinema in Bordeaux, including the big commercial chains. i had something similar to Dr C's response

for the first half hour I'm like huh, this is it? did not think the kids were especially great; who in the world spits like that in a spitting contest (you sniff and hock a loogie as every fule kno); the mother is aggressively stupid and unpleasant (though always loving with her daughter); dafoe too much of an angel; events occur, drift away, shapelessly. is this some kind of tone-poem? and then i guess about an hour or so into it somehow the accumulation starts taking on an awful inertial logic. it's a creeper. by the end i was a mess. halley's mouth filling the whole screen, yelling "fuck you" at the world. dafoe helpless, casting lamely about for some control or authority or ability to make things better ("i'll get those fixed by the end of the week" "...ok?") And you know this is probably not even that unusual for dafoe. it must have happened many times.

the ending maybe wasn't great but I'm not sure what would have constituted a "great" ending. one weird effect of it was that my chest was full of sadness and pain (i thought the crying jag was excellent by the way and totally believable) and suddenly the credits are there. i guess that's what happens when you skip the denouement. i can't stop thinking about it in any case.

by the way for you guys saying these kids have never displayed any interest in going to disneyworld, so the ending felt contrived? i feel like you're.. missing the conceit of the entire movie?? these kids grow up in the shadow of what is bought and sold as every child's ultimate wish. of COURSE they know about disneyworld. of COURSE the have asked to go there. but from the earliest age they have come to learn that they can't. because those wrist bands cost $1700 for four. disneyworld is a foundational aspect of their existence, always looming as something they can't have. so they block it out. pretend it's not there. they know exactly why those fireworks are happening. they know it's not for jancey's birthday. it's this massive unstated thing in the kids' lives that's intimately bound with money and inequality. so that last sequence for me was, yeah, maybe a fantasy sequence (it's the only time we hear non-diegetic music) but whatever it is, it's jancey (that just autocorrected to "hanley" lol) deciding she's had enough of this, she's had enough of not getting what she wants, enough of kids being told what they can't have. so i dunno.. maybe not a "great" ending (again not sure what that would have been) but not untrue to the movie's themes or its characters.

Good shout on the Fireworks scene.

I buy that reading, Tracer, thanks.

Nice post. As I said above, I loved the ending--more than anything else in the movie. I didn't even think for a second about the plausibility (which you make a good case for)--I was just caught up in the look of it, and for the breaking-free aspect of it, a kind of ending that I usually find moving. Too many examples to cite: the ending of The Perks of Being a Wallflower would be a recent favorite.

it's the place where all things are good, where no one is sad. where else to go when everything's closing in? what if the adults are wrong? what if we CAN go there?

i watched tangerine last night. it was only okay. felt like the plot was being stretched out way too long. Could have been about 20 minutes long really. Actors were good, well except for the guy who played the pimp boyfriend. nothing particularly illuminating about its treatment of trans sex work. also the soundtrack was really irritating.

not best review

lol

sorry to disappoint

😉

I love tangerine (and films that stretch 20 minutes of plot generally)

That's still too much plot. Unless we're talking a 3+ hour film.

50% of this film was this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MziZpcVkOB8

Busy Drag Queen just replaced Twin Peaks S3E8 on my top 10 list.

dvdscr of The Florida Project has leaked, that's my night's entertainment sorted.

TFP is still playing in DC for at least one more week. The idea of this movie fills me with grim flashbacks to American Honey and other glass-bottom boat tours of the American underclass. Should I make the effort and go see this?

Just see it and then spread your personal gospel about it.

I loved American Honey and thought this much shorter film was a gruesome farrago, so.

Having seen this, I stand by "glass-bottom boat tour of the American (and other capitalist economies') underclass."

I find it so weird that this 'glass-bottom boat tour' accusation has in general been so much stronger this time than it was when he did Tangerine.

Poor, badly clothed kids that live in the constant stress of housing + food insecurity are having so much fun tho.

There is barely any substance or emotional gravitas to the mothers or the kids imo, just the put upon hero played by Dafoe, who tries to help these "irresponsible scratter" mothers as far as he can within his job remit, he's the lone responsible adult. The unrelenting Yellow Smartie OD exuberance of the kids becomes very wearing as well. I think the A White comment about the class condescension in this movie is bang on tbh.

Some of y'all just don't like kids... 😳

Hey, some of my all time fave movies heavily feature children, like Germany Year Zero and Killer of Sheep. But not this.

ya i know i'm mostly being facetious (tho there are people itt who straight up said they don't like kids), i didn't think the kids were engaging enough to carry a movie without direction

Lol, soz I should have noted the emoticon!

I found The Florida Project agonizing for the exact reasons Alfred did. The movie gravely mistakes histrionics for drama; I suspect Baker's approach to directing the kids (and some of the adults) amounted to "just scream a lot and occasionally throw a tantrum and it'll be great." I liked Defoe well enough, though I have to wonder if I just appreciated the break his character provided from all the noise (the scene where he handles the creep hanging around the kids was good, the only moment in the film where I felt any real tension). The ending was laughable.

I'd say I'm baffled by the praise this film has been getting, but I'm not really: Baker scores points for being one of the very few American filmmakers these days to pay attention to poverty (I don't think the movie is condescending, exactly, just shrill to the point that empathy becomes nearly impossible). But this movie was so annoying that I actually might think less of Tangerine in retrospect.

Man, Red Rocket is one of <the> Texas movies. So grimy and gross and perfectly of its place.

Fun Fact: that donut shop isn't in Texas City, but actually about 100 miles west in a refinery city called Groves that's a little south of Beaumont/Port Arthur. It looked kinda familiar to me, so I dug a little deeper and it's just two blocks down from this old Cajun Dancehall & Seafood joint my Dad liked to day trip to see Swamp Pop bands.

This was a good fucking thread