Sight and Sound 2022: The Final Showdown

I may not be directly going for clemenza these days, but I for sure am going after his canon, so it's probably a gray area

I was going to post ask why we're more critical about film tastes.

Maybe for the same reason that Metacritic scores can tend to be much lower for movies than for records - the notion that a film is nominally meant "for everybody", so anyone can take a shot at it, while most music is only going to reach fans of the artist or genre.

Also film and other dramatic arts have so many "practical" elements that anyone can examine and debate, while fewer people want to argue about how exactly a song should have been written or produced.

most regulars here have had 10+ years of being mean about music on ILM and at some point it gets to diminishing returns.

We've also seen all these poorly-aged twenty-year-old threads whose first post is: "Isn't (revered musical genius) just a twat?"

you're kind of all over the place there between "nominally meant for" vs "going to reach"- these are not opposites

likewise "anyone can examine and debate" vs "fewer people want to"

im not seeing any less accessibility or immediacy for music than movies in the ways being argued and indeed am surprised to even see the argument being made given how utterly subjective any such statement would necessarily be

If you want me to connect the dots, the people who (assume they) would have hated a record don't even listen to it. It seems to me that the idea of a "hate-watch" is more prevalent than a "hate-listen" (though ILM would be the place it would most likely happen).

i hear you

but im not convinced people hate watch entire movies

i guess the big difference i might see is you are a lot less likely to walk out of a movie regardless of how bad once you are in, you're gonna skip a song or quit an album for a lot less reason

and if you are committed to reviewing a movie/album you are really gonna resent sitting through a former perhaps if you decide its not for you?

taking that aside i think i still disagree strongly that movies are any more made "for everyone" than music tho

im not convinced people hate watch entire movies

Only come Oscar season

It wouldn't surprise if, say, Tsai Ming-liang thinks he makes films for everyone.

im not convinced people hate watch entire movies

Only come Oscar season

Or if you're on a long-haul flight! Which is how I saw Woody Allen's Scoop, possibly the worst film I ever got to the end of.

I've hate-watched the last couple of Wes Anderson films.

fire him out of yr canon

Probably gonna vote for Black Narcissus, but obv love The Third Man and Goodfellas and they're contenders, with apologies to Goodbye Dragon Inn, Double Indemnity, 2001, and Spirited Away. Love em all. But the first three were altering experiences.

I think historically the most last film I truly hate-watched until the end was Inception, and that was only because my best friend was sitting with me in the audience and he seemed interested in the film.

I didn’t afford that courtesy to the friends I want to see The Dark Knight with however, I walked out and sat at the curb waiting for them to finish the film, figuring they could keep each other company through the overwrought storyline and painfully dominating score

not that anyone cares but jfr I'd like to withdraw my "fuck off" for The Third Man, just looked at my letterboxd and I've got it logged at 4.5, I must've been mixing it up with something else, no idea what. i stand by the others tho

I saw Goodfellas again tonight, as I have been going through Scorsese’s films in order. It was such a clash with his previous film, The Last Temptation of Christ

I can understand the achievement - but it really was a hate-watch for me

Perhaps confused with The 4th Man?

I can understand the achievement - but it really was a hate-watch for me

― Dan S

What made it hateful?

I guess the glorification of toxic masculinity? and the fetishization of violence

I saw no glorification of....anything? Except the American justice system? They all die or go to prison. Besides, every reaction shot of the wives, girlfriends, and Hill himself allows us to see the cost of the violence. I think of that reaction shot of Paulie's wife as he's being led away, for example.

I don't know, it's the same reaction I had to The Wolf of Wall Street

The fight between Lorraine Bracco and Ray Liotta when he was in prison, with their toddlers crying while witnessing it, that was awful. Just extreme uncaring adult vanity. And the other characters are so much worse

I know the film is ostensibly punishing these people, but not really to me, it is showing these awful men in a very alluring light

i think its explicitly mocking about finding men like this alluring

bracco's delivery of "a very attractive man" does not imo beg the viewer to agree nor to even pass by noting the statement, we are 100% being invited to consider and judge her for this (and frankly imo question its sincerity and/or plausibility) as well as him for who he is

it is showing these awful men in a very alluring light

The fight between Lorraine Bracco and Ray Liotta when he was in prison, with their toddlers crying while witnessing it, that was awful. Just extreme uncaring adult vanity. And the other characters are so much worse

Correct -- the film indicts them all. It doesn't glorify them."

it is showing these awful men in a very alluring light

No, it's not! One of my favorite cutaways in the last third is to Paulie grilling a sausage. That's what his life has become: a mob boss in his bathrobe whose most trusted boy he knows will sell him out, and the only thing he can control is that goddamn sausage.

You're really getting this wrong imo.

I guess maybe you're right.

I just can't separate myself from Ray Liotta's voice-over, and as the narrator it seems like the film is wanting you to empathize with him

That's the ambiguity of the film.

I'm not voting for it ftr

Perhaps confused with The 4th Man?

― Halfway there but for you, Sunday, September 10, 2023 6:50 PM (forty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

if the 4th man (which i would call a top five verhoeven picture) were on this list it’d be a way more interesting and perverted and bisexual list (crash will once again do in a pinch)

yes the absence of queerness here is, I guess, no surprise

i mean the third man is gay too, tbf

fwiw while I agree with everything Alfred and darra say I also think Goodfellas *does* portray the mobster life as attractive at times, especially early on - you know, the "Rags To Riches" drop and all that. But that is necessary, otherwise it'd just be "horrible ppl do horrible things for no discernible reason", which tbf is the plot of many films but not the kind of thing an old Catholic like Scorsese is interested in. Evil must be alluring, but it must also lead to ruin.

I have no moral issue with any of this, kinda have one with Henry Hill and the fed's commentary track tho (if we're viewing that as part of the Work).

xposts

ofc annie hall is here embodying eternities of straight repression

xp

I also think Goodfellas *does* portray the mobster life as attractive at times, especially early on - you know, the "Rags To Riches" drop and all that. But that is necessary, otherwise it'd just be "horrible ppl do horrible things for no discernible reason", which tbf is the plot of many films but not the kind of thing an old Catholic like Scorsese is interested in. Evil must be alluring, but it must also lead to ruin.

― Daniel_Rf, Sunday, September 10, 2023

but that ruin, with Scorsese's magic, is also portrayed as alluring and attractive, which is my problem with it

Crash was really good, and that last scene by the side of the road after the accident was all-time great

it is the closest a movie has gotten to a poem for me

and yet it is so perverted and disgusting. god

but that ruin, with Scorsese's magic, is also portrayed as alluring and attractive, which is my problem with it

It's dialectical!

but that ruin, with Scorsese's magic, is also portrayed as alluring and attractive, which is my problem with it

Is it? As Alfred says, he ends as some shmuck in witness protection, trapped in the suburban hell he spe t his life trying to escape. It's hardly a Cagney/Scarface glorious death in battle ending.

scorsese is seduced by violence and violent men, he lingers and stylizes and all that, but hes not a mindless moth to the flame of the character imo

I suppose one could say The Age of Innocence fetishizes thwarted longing, but that's not what happens.

Is it? As Alfred says, he ends as some shmuck in witness protection, trapped in the suburban hell he spe t his life trying to escape. It's hardly a Cagney/Scarface glorious death in battle ending.

If Goodfellas taught me anything, it's that a man in a bathrobe is a defeated man.

it's probably arguably true that Casino does a better job of making an even grander and more moneyed world look even more unappealing and hellish, but i think Goodfellas is excellent at showing how shortsighted and stupid these dudes are, living night by night and never thinking more than a couple of steps ahead, to the point that they're incapable of sighting the death coming for them, unless they're fortunate enough to be the last one alive and they finally figure it out. Henry Hill was a dead man walking the instant Jimmy boxed him out of the inner circle w/r/t Morrie, for example. He's living on borrowed time and doesn't know it. i think this film is def in the vein of The Public Enemy or other films, really violent and frequently funny movies which are also more obviously moralistic (and Goodfellas is, just not obviously so.)

as soon as everyone starts wearing bathrobes in Goodfellas, it's over!

Jimmy trying to fit the silencers on the guns: bathrobe city over there

would argue those 30's movies aren't moralistic at all! or well, they have moralistic endings appended to them to placate moralists but with your usual WB joint there's never any doubt that James Cagney or Edward G Robinson are really cool, morally righteous dudes getting theirs

I never hear anyone complain about this but then those movies also don't show up on lists much

I agree

Goodfellas. Basic problem here is, all the imagery that mirrors the viewer's wish-fulfillment fantasies of glamor, wealth and power are far stronger and more memorable than the eventual images of their loss. The unintended takeaway is that most of the audience has never had any glamor, wealth or power at any point in their lives, so those high-flying gangster lives are still powerful images for the audience's envy.

hmm idk, The Public Enemy has the character of Tom's brother Mike, scolding him for a life of crime throughout. I'd say this is NOT a detriment to the story though, those scenes are pretty great. in Goodfellas it's more about who we see on the sidelines and in the background, watching. Scorsese does this in The Irishman too, with Anna Paquin, more obviously but really effectively i think.

Aimless, you said it exactly

Just as grim are the sequences where schmuck fry sausages and collect the morning paper in bathrobes.

What Aimless describes is truer about Warner Bros gangter flicks.

i think what Scorsese does do that the WB films don't is make the downfall not precipitous but gradual, they still think they're living the high life but all around them are the signs that will lead to their doom, but they're too self-absorbed to notice them. Too dumb to make the types of decisions that would right the ship. and thank god for the story imo, they're completely lacking in self-reflection.

Let's change the subject. Can we discuss Goodbye, Dragon Inn or Pickpocket?

Goodbye Dragon Inn is such a mesmerizing film.

I'm sort of afraid to rewatch Goodbye, Dragon Inn because I loved it so much the first time I saw it and I've kind of mythologized it in my mind. But I expect it will hold up to repeat viewing. There's a ghostliness about it.

Goodfellas is supposedly one of the more simplistic movies here yet people continue to not get what the director is doing.