Nope (dir. Jordan Peele)

The T-shirts, explained.

The explanation: "They're [the character's] band T-shirts"

i really liked this! palmer and kaluuya were great and the set piece at the end was extremely clever. i'd love to know what inspired peele to cast michael wincott.

that voice, probably. everybody associates dust and cowboys with deep voiced people

"And it's Kattan, so he's CRUSHING it."

that bit was great because that is totally who would have played the chimp in that era of SNL

Lots of chatter about the band t-shirts but the fact that there was an Exuma needle drop and they showed the cover in a big studio release is wild.

the documentary filmmaker showed up with his non-electrical camera.

Hooray for analog media! The classic vinyl, the film cameras, the old Haywood promo videotape showing the Muybridge short....

Like, How can you get a Black character into this iconic 1950s Western shot, and have the shot "make sense" in the context of the surrounding movie and carry the same affective weight that it would have in a classic Western, while telling an entirely original story in a contemporary setting?

It's definitely a detournement of the classic Western trope of the (white) hero in a white hat riding a white horse.

I've grown to appreciate how Peele sets up the opening credits where you go 'what am I looking at and what does it have to do with anything I've heard about this film so far' -- and this time around he did it twice. (And when I realized what the black box with the cast names in it it was, yikes.)

Also, between the opening quote here and the one for Mad God, good few for deeply fucked up Bible quotes kicking off a movie.

Few weeks, I should say.

https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/4470/buck-and-the-preacher#overview

There was a prominently displayed poster for Buck and the Preacher (1972). Conveniently this will be shown on TCM on August 4, 2am (EST), as part of Sidney Poitier's Summer Under the Stars day. I know I want to check this out.

I...quite liked this movie. Other than the OJ dad backstory, the lack of "humanizing" elements and tedious exposition felt right -- even about the UFO.

TMZ dude looked like a Daft Punker.

Worth a read: http://reverseshot.org/reviews/entry/2959/nope

xp and sounded like Nicolas Cage! (I really want to believe this was an uncredited cameo)

If only, but it was this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devon_Graye

We took the kids yesterday, we all enjoyed the heck out of it. My older son, who pays attention to this kind of thing, said that he liked "how many metaphors there were for filmmaking."

Your son OTM

Brandon Perea is my new crush.

he reminds me of riz ahmed

Brilliant casting. Very much captured that kind of SoCal dude.

I'm supposed to be cheering, I know. As I posted at the time, I thought Peele's first two films were audacious--even though they drifted into conventional horror-film stuff towards the end, the conception of each was great. "We're Americans"--I still think about that line, thought it was brilliant.

I liked the Gordy story here, and wished the whole film were about that. (Even though, beyond the Jupe connection, I either missed or am too lazy to figure out the deeper connection to the main story.) I thought the Muybridge stuff at the beginning was really promising--again, if there was follow-through, I missed it. Three of the four principals were pretty good. Couldn't stand the cameraman's Sam Elliot imitation.

Thought the last half-hour was an ordeal, and quite silly. It kind of reminded me of why I got tired of Stranger Things--I can only take so much of a rag-tag crew banding together to defeat the monster. (And the way Emerald actually did it--was that an Austin Powers tribute?) And dialogue like "Are we still rolling?" "You're goddamn right we are!" They really needed George Kennedy to deliver that line.

Now about them fashions

Talking with @roxana_hadadi, #NOPEMOVIE's costume designer explains each and every decision that was made to complement the film’s considerations of celebrity, spectacle, and storytelling https://t.co/dpWJXO2spG

— Vulture (@vulture) August 1, 2022

Walter Chaw had very mixed feelings.

Whatever my responses to his three films, I don't get how Peele has become "bunkered and solipsistic."

the reverse shot piece that alfred linked was excellent

first paragraph of that walter chaw piece is exhausting just watch a fuckin movie man

Who is Walter Chaw, this shit sucks

Not much to chaw on.

Thought all those questions in that first paragraph were perfectly valid. I stopped caring enough to have any questions at a certain point.

Walter, you know a movie is just a bunch of made up shit, right?

Are you saying a film's internal logic shouldn't be questioned? That would be a new development in film criticism, for sure.

i watch every movie with a paper and a pen to make sure that every question is answered on screen and deduct points when they aren't

This all strikes me as very strange. Questioning points of logic was second nature for someone like Pauline Kael. Just one example that comes to mind: the idea that De Niro would shake Walken's head at the end of The Deer Hunter. Pointing these things out is one of the things film critics do, or at least used to.

There's a powerful opening scene where something happens involving a nickel that is very effective up until the moment it's explained, at which point it no longer makes sense; why did it do what it did and not what it does for the rest of the film?

I don't get this one. At several points, we see the UFO discarding metal objects that it's sucked up.

Defending the film against his questions, as jaymc does, saying he missed something, that I understand. Dismissing his questions out of hand, like he doesn't have a right to ask them, that I don't get at all.

"if i eat a balloon, will i explode?" is not a good faith examination of the film's internal logic

The excerpt (from Chaw’s review?) that jaymc shared feels like the Riddle of the Sphinx or something

(Or maybe I’m just tired.)

I guess he was trying for humour with the eat-a-balloon line, but, as I mentioned above, I also found that preposterous as a resolution--worse even that Joaquin Phoenix grabbing the baseball bat in Signs, which, like Chaw, I liked better than Nope.

ok how about: questioning a film's internal logic is one thing, but dwelling on it to such an extent that you start to misrepresent the film is another

a lot of plots i hold great esteem for have holes in them. finding one of these and exploiting them is not necessarily good criticism to me, and often ends up being a not seeing the forest for the trees kind of deal. (this type of criticism takes ruinous forms on both youtube (as cinemasins) and on the general internet (as "ilx film and tv threads".) i also don't think internally consistent logic is necessarily a hallmark of good storytelling. imagination and curiosity are, though

i've never been a big fan of kael tho, every time i read one of her collections i get distracted by the bad opinions. my problem as a reader

also obv the film in the analog camera would prob get mixed with blood and viscera in the flying stomach that is the creature but again if you're thinking this hard about it you've tricked yourself out of the experience

I don't think any of Peele's plots really survive logical scrutiny, but that's pretty normal for horror movies. The genre prioritizes sensation over sense, and I think Peele understands that well.

I think internal logic is much more important to some kinds of films than others. It doesn't bother me at all that there may have been no one in the room to hear Kane whisper "Rosebud." (Even though I think it's easy to explain how there probably was.) The Big Sleep famously gets away with a lot. And if I had found lots to love in this film, I'm sure I wouldn't care here. I didn't. He didn't either, and if all these questions were on his mind when he sat down to write his review, I think that's a good entry point. (As I say, I just basically tuned out at a certain point.)

Pretty sure I have no problem dismissing whatever I want on some guy's blog

Oh. He doesn't have enough stature or name recognition to ask these questions.

From Anthony Lane's review: "That is why [Peele] strives to connect the dots--bringing together the zones of his story with a bizarre sequence in which Jupe, hosting an outdoor event, promises a crowd of customers that the spaceship will swing by. But this is nonsense; hitherto, it wasn’t clear that he even knew about the alien presence."

While watching the movie, I was also a little confused by this. But on further reflection, it became obvious that Jupe had known about the UFO for a while -- this is why he kept buying horses from the Haywoods! Far from being "nonsense," I liked that it wasn't spelled out.

Is Kael an advocate for clean plotting? I'd say the opposite, or, rather, I don't remember her spending paragraphs dissecting plot points except for the occasional joke?

this is why he kept buying horses from the Haywoods! Far from being "nonsense," I liked that it wasn't spelled out.

Yeah, I noticed this too. He trusts the audience to understand it's in Jupe's huckster personality to figure out how to exploit the scenario.

(xpost) She wasn't fixated on it, I don't think, but I recall numerous examples of her pointing out things that didn't quite fit together logically. In her GFII review, I think she mentioned the reappearance of Willi Cicci, who had seemingly been killed off earlier.