Paul Schrader's 'slow' transcendental drama FIRST REFORMED w/ Ethan Hawke

It's Schrader listing the influences, not the interviewer!

Great stuff

uh that's what I meant -- why was the interviewer so prissy about it? It's not like it's a secret.

I guess they wanted to match crank with crank, except Schrader only pretends to be a crank?

the interviewer also insisted first reformed was a remake of diary of a country priest before that which i thought was pretty silly

schrader's a good interview bc a few of these questions are dead-enders and he still manages to answer them with substance or at least substantial related anecdotes. you can tell he was/is a critic, i'm really into that

Film Comment:

“WILL GOD FORGIVE US?” asks Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (of Ethan Hawke’s Oscar snub). Schrader’s newly announced film sounds like another exercise in the transcendental, described by the filmmaker as being: “Basically, if you took a script from 1956 that Budd Boetticher made with Randolph Scott, and you asked Terry Malick and David Lynch to come in and take a shit on the script, you would have the movie I’m making.”

FIRST REFORMED (2018)

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— Eric Allen Hatch (@ericallenhatch) August 28, 2018

I finally got my girlfriend to watch this with me over the weekend. I had seen it before, but so long ago that I remembered little beyond the final sequence and the superfund site. She had a completely different interpretation of the ending, and now I'm wondering how many other people share that interpretation. (She thought Reverend Toller drank the poison, and Mary's appearance was not a miraculous rescue but a vision in death, alluded to earlier in the film when Toller tries to imagine the dead man's final thoughts.)

Basically I think her take is right

yeah that's how I interpreted it when I watched

same

As much as I think I generally prefer Schrader as a director to Scorsese, he doesn't have the deftness to sustain doubt as Scorsese did doing the same thing at the end of Taxi Driver

It honestly would never have occurred to me to doubt the image I am presented with. I don't find anything in the film up to that point which supports the idea of an "unreliable camera" (and that includes the earlier levitation sequence, which I felt was a depiction of a genuine miracle, rather than some sort of "now we are inside his head" thing)

I mean, maybe

I've also never seen Taxi Driver so I don't have that point of reference.

(But weirdly, in that one old Smog song where he sings "47 pushups / In a winter rates seaside motel / I feel like Travis Bickle / I'm listening to Highway to Hell," I feel like I understand exactly what he means?)

It honestly would never have occurred to me to doubt the image I am presented with. I don't find anything in the film up to that point which supports the idea of an "unreliable camera" (and that includes the earlier levitation sequence, which I felt was a depiction of a genuine miracle, rather than some sort of "now we are inside his head" thing)

by that logic, the camera was reliable during the scene he drank the poison.

Well, yes, because there is no scene where Toller drinks poison*. We see him fill a glass and lift it, and then we see him stop with the glass nowhere near his face when he notices something off screen. He looks frozen when we cut away from him, and he does not appear to have moved when we cut back to him a second later. And, while the camera is placed far enough to make it difficult to see the contents of the glass after this cutaway, it is not hard at all to see the glittering arc of liquid that flies from the glass when Toller lets it drop to the floor, if one looks for it, as I did a minute ago.

*Of course, alcohol is poison; and the sushi he ate in the fancy restaurant was probably loaded with mercury; so in the long wrong he is just as fucked as the rest of us.

I'm starting to see some mental contortions at work at this point

Well I did have to find the remote so I could pull the movie up again and jump to the scene in question, but I wouldn't exactly call it "work"