the Narrator is introduced as an "empathy vampire" attending 12-step meetings he has no real stake in; v heroic
save it for the FC anniversary next month, you cloddish motherfuckers
― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 01:47 (four years ago) link
I didn't like it at the time but Fight Club sounds interesting in retrospect
― Dan S, Tuesday, 10 September 2019 01:55 (four years ago) link
It might've worked best as a Henry James story.
― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 01:56 (four years ago) link
Let's just say the way it presents itself and the message it tries to convey are somewhat at odds.
― Mario Meatwagon (Moodles), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 01:56 (four years ago) link
Still never figured out how they got away with showing Thora Birch (born 1982) topless. It fits with Alfred’s “constantly hedging but congratulating itself.”
― ... (Eazy), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 02:43 (four years ago) link
Yes, a pathetic loser... until he joins (starts) the nihilistic death cult that gives him male friendship and a hot lady to fuck.
― Greta Van Show Feets BB (milo z), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 02:45 (four years ago) link
I actually hated this movie back in 1965, the year of Sam Mendes being born.
― circa1916, Tuesday, 10 September 2019 02:48 (four years ago) link
Amazing that it's not Mendes's worst (The Road To Perdition wins that battle)
― Greta Van Show Feets BB (milo z), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 03:10 (four years ago) link
Quantum of Solace
― When I am afraid, I put my toast in you (Neanderthal), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 03:33 (four years ago) link
The Road To Perdition wins that battle
He who lives by the Hanks, dies by the Hanks.
― A is for (Aimless), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 03:45 (four years ago) link
I did see a National Theatre screening of the amended-directed Lehman Trilogy, which is fantastic.
Now that you mention Bond, Skyfall is the only Mendes movie I’ve liked at all.
― ... (Eazy), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 03:54 (four years ago) link
*Mendes-directed (ugh autocorrect)
― ... (Eazy), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 03:55 (four years ago) link
in the early days of movie message boards basically Dogma and Fight Club and American Beauty and Blair Witch were some of the new classics of cinema everyone rode for.
― omar little
how does the Matrix fit into this
or am i confusing the thread because I have very mixed feelings on the Matrix
― sock fingering, baby (rushomancy), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 06:16 (four years ago) link
I know someone who will still get drunk and start telling randoms at a party about the Matrix and Baudrillard.
― Greta Van Show Feets BB (milo z), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 06:50 (four years ago) link
sam mendes is such a fucking DO U SEE middlebrow hack
― don’t bore us, get to the aeon of horus (bizarro gazzara), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 07:03 (four years ago) link
he is one of the worst things
― theRZA the JZA and the NDB (darraghmac), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 07:57 (four years ago) link
a recent re-watch of this was as bad as expected but i did not expect it to look as ugly as it did.
― ryan, Tuesday, 10 September 2019 08:40 (four years ago) link
what makes FC a much more interesting movie is that it's far more willing to engage with actual transgression rather than smug self-congratulations of AB. AB never once challenges its audience's sensibilities, all the while pretending to be edgy. FC also arguably very smug but that's an intentional part of the text, I like to think. That Durden's authentic inchoate/primal/masochistic rebellion ("just hit me!") shades so easily into semi-violent para-military anarcho-fascism (the incoherence is the point!) or even full-on death-drive is also the obvious point...it's supposed to be "cool"... until it isn't.
I find the nihilistic ending funny but also I think it's intended to be hopeful since it's the moment the implicit symbolism of Tyler's revolution (going back to year zero) becomes, for the character, a moment in which a different/better self is finally maybe possible (but maybe not, as the dick splice implies). The irony of the hate the movie gets is that, in the end, it really amounts to a kind of defense of the status quo. And as everyone has pointed out, the movie's worshipers are engaging in exactly the kind of hapless and impotent "rebellion" that the movie satirizes. It's perhaps to the movie's detriment that it can't find a third way except in its admirable refusal of overt moralizing.
The overt moralizing of AB, by contrast, is what makes it such a shallow movie--nothing is really risked, there's no *real* rebellion, we're on his side the whole time, and he even "does the right thing" (doesn't sleep with a teenager) since, after all, he's a good guy. We leave the theater and the world is exactly as it should be...death drive indulged and deferred and the ~very same~ suburban american wasteland the movie spends most of its time mocking is sentimentally reaffirmed. Give me the collapsing buildings instead.
― ryan, Tuesday, 10 September 2019 09:10 (four years ago) link
booming post ryan
not sure why today everyone is talking about bad films from the 90s that they don't like, but w/e
― mfktz (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 09:31 (four years ago) link
Yeah great post Ryan, hits exactly what I've not been able to put into words about AB (which 17-year old me loved at the time)
― Vinnie, Tuesday, 10 September 2019 10:47 (four years ago) link
https://media3.giphy.com/media/IqtLevb2hxYkM/source.gif
― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 10:48 (four years ago) link
^^ prescient imo
― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 10:49 (four years ago) link
ryan otm
― american bradass (BradNelson), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 10:49 (four years ago) link
the cinematographer of AB, Conrad Hall, did a lot of good stuff from the '60s on (In Cold Blood, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy, The Day of the Locust, Marathon Man)
― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 11:13 (four years ago) link
― Greta Van Show Feets BB (milo z)
i mean, that's cool, i'm glad they can see it in a baudrillardian sense... i can't really do that, first off not having read baudrillard, second off as much as i respect the wachowskis as trans pioneers it just seems like so much neoplatonism to me, shallow and kind of wrong. even if i actively try to read it as relating to trans depersonalization/derealization i can't get anything out of it, because fucking dualism! i haven't even seen the sequels because nobody has ever said anything to indicate that i would benefit from seeing them.
― sock fingering, baby (rushomancy), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 13:27 (four years ago) link
the sequels are great and linger on the meaning of personal choice in a world where all of your options are laid out for you in advance. imo you would benefit from seeing them
― american bradass (BradNelson), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 13:44 (four years ago) link
prepared for the flurry of posts informing me that the matrix sequels are not great
― american bradass (BradNelson), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 13:45 (four years ago) link
Just gonna say that Speed Racer is great and leave it at that
― Mario Meatwagon (Moodles), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 13:58 (four years ago) link
speed racer is easily their best imo
love to derail an american beauty thread toward the wachowskis
― american bradass (BradNelson), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 14:03 (four years ago) link
Definitely relate to the experience of initially taking the bait w/american beauty. I remember rewatching it when it came out on video and couldnt believe I'd previously fallen for its bullshit.
Fight club & the matrix I smelled a rat from the get-go. At the ending of the matrix when keanu slips on a pair of sick oakley shades and flys away(?) or whatever, I remember yelling out "DO THE DEW!" which 17y/o me thought was a p funny heckle but everyone else in the theater did not
― “Hakuna Matata,” a nihilist philosophy (One Eye Open), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 14:31 (four years ago) link
(they were right, heckling any movie is a monstrous activity for savages)
― “Hakuna Matata,” a nihilist philosophy (One Eye Open), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 14:32 (four years ago) link
no, it's in The Departed you should smell a rat
― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 14:55 (four years ago) link
"The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce" - Baudrillard
― Ward Fowler, Tuesday, 10 September 2019 15:09 (four years ago) link
Could never get past trying to figure out how Morpheus's shades stayed in place.
― ... (Eazy), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 15:11 (four years ago) link
Will echo some of the posts itt, I saw AB as a 15-16 old and it genuinely seemed ~profound~ at the time. Definitely get how it could strike a chord with an angsty, clueless suburban adolescent suspicious of the adult rat race maannn.Like only two years later in college I excitedly put in on for some friends who had never seen it before and I was incredibly embarrassed.
― circa1916, Tuesday, 10 September 2019 20:20 (four years ago) link
― don’t bore us, get to the aeon of horus (bizarro gazzara), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 20:23 (four years ago) link
― american bradass (BradNelson)
that's ok brad if you think i should watch them i'll put them on the list
i too thought "speed racer" was their best film but i only watched the first 20 minutes, should i watch the rest?
― sock fingering, baby (rushomancy), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 23:38 (four years ago) link
matrix sequels are terrible tbh
― theRZA the JZA and the NDB (darraghmac), Tuesday, 10 September 2019 23:47 (four years ago) link
Matrix Reloaded has its considerably good moments but that ending...
Revolutions is dreadful imo.
― omar little, Wednesday, 11 September 2019 00:24 (four years ago) link
Speed Racer is one of the greatest films of the 2000s
― El Tomboto, Wednesday, 11 September 2019 00:37 (four years ago) link
When American Beauty came out my closest moviegoing friends and I were eighteen-year-old boys--literally the stupidest creatures that God ever put on this planet--and even we all immediately recognized that American Beauty was a reeking heap of rancid offal.— ℑ 𝔇𝔬𝔫'𝔱 𝔅𝔩𝔞𝔪𝔢 𝔜𝔬𝔲 (@NickPinkerton) September 12, 2019
― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 12 September 2019 11:47 (four years ago) link
I'm going to put this here, but I just learned via Red Letter Media that not only are there two cinematographers named Conrad Hall (Conrad L. Hall and Conrad W. Hall), but they *both* worked on American Beauty!
― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, 24 September 2019 17:43 (four years ago) link
Father and son. L’s father was James Norman Hall, co-author of Mutiny on the Bounty.
― by the light of the burning Citroën, Tuesday, 24 September 2019 17:53 (four years ago) link
Ah. Maybe I knew that.
― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, 24 September 2019 18:06 (four years ago) link
I didn’t dislike AMERICAN BEAUTY—I hated it. It’s not that it’s badly made—it isn’t. It has snappy rhythms and Kevin Spacey’s line readings are very smart, and Annette Bening is skillful in the scene where she beats up on herself. But the picture is a con. (1999)— pauline kael bot (@paulinekaelbot) January 14, 2023
― The self-titled drags (Eazy), Saturday, 14 January 2023 17:02 (one year ago) link
Kael OTM
― Lord Pickles (Boring, Maryland), Saturday, 14 January 2023 17:07 (one year ago) link
It is very skillful at passing off some bullshit as deep truths.
― Muad'Doob (Moodles), Saturday, 14 January 2023 17:08 (one year ago) link
most poorly-written Oscar winner EVER. And that's saying something.
One of those categories that had 4 good-to-great nominees and somehow the other, utter piece of shit ended up winning.
American Beauty, Alan BallBeing John Malkovich, Charlie KaufmanMagnolia, Paul Thomas AndersonThe Sixth Sense, M. Night ShyamalanTopsy-Turvy, Mike Leigh
― عباس کیارستمی (Eric H.), Saturday, 14 January 2023 17:15 (one year ago) link
i have never seen this film
― mark s, Saturday, 14 January 2023 17:16 (one year ago) link
One of the replies to that tweet links to a late interview with Kael. Can’t wait to dive into this.
She rips on it more here. https://t.co/feAFtXujD6— Charles Bennet (@ChuckBenetRamse) January 14, 2023
― The self-titled drags (Eazy), Saturday, 14 January 2023 17:18 (one year ago) link