Ari Aster's MIDSOMMAR (2019)

Fuck ambiguity.

Otm. Ambiguity seems like a perfect argument for people who *haven't seen the fucking movie yet* to rail against it guns blazing. Fuck that.

i am complaining about hereditary, a film i saw

Fetishizing "ambiguity" in movies is some classist middlebrow bullshit.

go on

fkn rosebud amirite?

and yes i think it gets so narrow and boxed-in by the end that the story loses all imagination and any fascination for me, if you love that good for you xp

Fetishizing "ambiguity" in movies is some classist middlebrow bullshit.

― shared unit of analysis (unperson), Monday, July 8, 2019

I thought the complaint about middlebrow entertainment was its clarity and narrative inevitability?

ambiguity seems like a pretty elemental part of horror as a genre to me, your mileage may fuckin vary i guess

Ambiguity about what, though? To take a recent example I saw (because I generally don't watch horror movies), did you like Get Out? Did that movie contain ambiguity?

i started the get out thread! get out is an effective polemic so it does not necessarily require ambiguity, no, ok i take it back

but also i think it plays with ambiguity until the hypnosis scene, and generally offers a lot to think about beyond that. hereditary offered me absolutely nothing to think about except toni collette's performance and ari aster's hatred for his own characters

I don’t think ambiguity is de facto good, or bad, or fundamental to horror, or... classist?

That is my take

also i am using "polemic" incorrectly i think

ari aster's hatred for his own characters
this is also overstated and not otm imo

what i mean is that the politics of get out are very unambiguous in a good way

Guys

i love to overstate and be wrong, it is my true purpose itt

I thought the complaint about middlebrow entertainment was its clarity and narrative inevitability?

Upper-middlebrow entertainment--at least since Last Year at Marienbad--has seized on ambiguity as a signifier of quality.

Brad i think you should just see the movie. it's enjoyable if you like this sort of thing! i do. i was worried that the wicker man parallels would put me off because i am such a fan of the original, but there were a lot of different things to like. i like drama for horror people and horror for drama people. i especially like dirgey processions and would enjoy more of them in movies tbh.

*indicates upthread* i'm! seeing it on thursday! i guess i should complain about hereditary in its own thread but i thought flappy was otm!

but i agree with simon, i expect to like this a lot more than hereditary

i did and i thought hereditary was pretty great! i hope you enjoy it. try to have an open mind :)

[spoilers for hereditary stop reading if you haven't seen it] a lot of horror movies turn on the "is this really happening? oh my god it's really happening" axis and i guess where hereditary rubbed me wrong is what's really happening is fuckin boring and also stops dead a pretty decent exploration of the way profound grief and guilt ripples through a family so we can watch toni collette saw her own head off in mid-air. which in and of itself is a neat and disturbing image but also seemed to be the film running out of ideas and gas. are we so hypnotized by the trauma inflicted on us that we are doomed not only to repeat it but to become sacrificial goats in mom's satanic nudist colony? idk, but it's not coherent, and the incoherence doesn't suggest anything interesting to me. i came away feeling cheated and manipulated

this is what i meant when i quoted flappy's post, the whole thing just flattened out for me. looking forward to midsommar see y'all thursday

I get that feeling; it's why I detest Funny Games.

o_0

I dislike Funny Games too. It's easy if you try!

I didn't like Funny Games either.

I did like Hereditary a lot though.

That's a good take from Brad indeed. Realizing he's gone until Thursday -- yes, this is all 'really happening' in Midsommar, and arguably both the break-up dark comedy (an angle I caught here and there while watching, since the film certainly is often quite funny, but which admittedly became even clearer thanks to the various thoughts and interviews) and the relentless sense of building sacrifice of some sort are meant to be inescapably real. But that's where I think the less-remarked-about trauma portrayed in Midsommar may be stronger than the blood feasts, namely the suicide/murder that starts off the whole film and immediately isolates Dani as an orphan -- in a way, you could argue the slyest move of Aster's here was closely but not exactly reproducing the circumstances of the end of Hereditary where there's a family reduced to one survivor and putting that as the start, as well as establishing that (as far as can be seen) Dani literally has nobody else to turn to aside from Christian and his immediate circle. And of course Dani's family's collective death isn't bloodily gruesome -- her sister's appearance is haunting and wrenching, certainly, but not a gorefest, and her parents just seem to be asleep -- but that image literally recurs at key parts as her interpretive subconscious working hard. The whole subtext throughout the film really is "I have lost EVERYTHING," and by showing that loss -- instead of, say, referring to it, starting the movie in the aftermath or the like -- much of the rest follows.

And yeah, fuck Funny Games. Both versions.

Let's not put a limit on the number of reasons one gets to detest Funny Games.

Seriously that movie was horrible. No love for Funny Games the movie but I do think humans are the worst monsters in general. I didn't get the same vibe from Hereditary at all. One of the things i liked most about MIDSOMMAR was the way intense trauma kept reappearing and also receding for Dani. Felt very real to me.

I also wondered if Paal (? the guy who invited them to the commune) was telling the truth about how he ended up there (being orphaned) or if he was just trying to persuade her to stay. if he was genuinely empathizing with her, that's another interesting wrinkle imo.

Detesting Funny Games is fine, I was bemused at the idea that it's a weirdo ambiguous setup where what's happening may not be real for the family

tbf I was reacting mostly to this: what's really happening is fuckin boring[...] i came away feeling cheated and manipulated

Like, good on you dude, you did a violent meta movie about how movie violence is terrible. Why weren't you brave enough to cut out all of the grandstanding "I INDICT YOU, AUDIENCE" 4th-wall breaking since it actually undercut the point you were trying to make?

It didn’t undercut the premise so much as it absolved him of the blanket condemnation, even though as the director of the film he deserved it most.

Aside from the notion that no genre more readily invites audiences to dig around for metaphoric signifiers than horror. Unless that’s the point that Haneke was making, in the end ... that it’s all to easy to commit atrocities and then hide within the cloak of “society, man”-ing

You’ll forgive me for only having seen that movie once a long time ago and having going on about my life ever since.

You could sleep, too, couldn't you?

Aside from the notion that no genre more readily invites audiences to dig around for metaphoric signifiers than horror. Unless that’s the point that Haneke was making, in the end ... that it’s all to easy to commit atrocities and then hide within the cloak of “society, man”-ing

― Pauline Male (Eric H.), Monday, July 8, 2019 11:34 PM (twenty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Bang on. One for the liner notes of the Criterion 25th anniversary release.

I was impressed that the festival went so well, considering nobody from the previous one would be alive to offer feedback from the previous one

Thought the same thing! Also, why 90? Why 72? They died at 72 right, so 18 years = enough time to create a new generation? For sure their methods for passing down knowledge left a lot to the imagination considering their method of following their designated “oracle”.They said very little about that.

"btw the killing innocent people thing doesn't work - our next harvest was terrible. Please exclude the killing from all subsequent festivals"

maybe that was the signified in some of the cool folk art on the walls of the temples and bunkhouses

I was a little confused as to how they could have so many photographs of May Queens when the festival only hap ends every 90 years. My impression was that they crown one every summer solstice but only perform the rites at that interval.

Also, Pelle said his parents were lost in a fire, which made me think they were lost to the rites, but that doesn't exactly uhh line up temporally speaking

I'm not entirely sure I liked this, and look forward to reading this thread and other reviews. But much of this felt as if Eli Roth came across an unproduced script by Stanley Kubrick inspired by the lyrics to "Stairway to Heaven."

Irdg the Eli Roth comparisons. For starters the Roth version of this would be about 20x more violent. (Tbh this movie already exists and it's called The Green Inferno.)

Are other people bringing up Eli Roth? I think it may stem from the repeated references to them being Americans, and also two of the characters/victims being utter douchebags, and certainly all of them being somewhat insensitive to this weird enclave. Also, yeah, doesn't help that Green Inferno came out just a few years ago. There's more going on with this one, but I'm not sure how much more, or What It Means.

Who did the score? Very Popol Vuh.