Nope (dir. Jordan Peele)

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.

And I'm sure she was more exacting when she didn't like a film, which is why Walter Chaw's questions don't strike me as anything unusual. He didn't like a lot of the film, he's explaining why, and these questions are front and center. Later on, he praises a few things he did like.

re: "but this is nonsense"; see, when critics do this they can inadvertently reveal how little they were paying attention... lol

yeah i thought it was a pretty clear cut thing - he feeds horses to the monster until the monster decides horses aren't enough. it's a parallel to the gordy story. in both cases, people hubristically think they can understand or tame an animal by ascribing human characteristics to it, without realizing that these animals operate only according to their basest desires.

also interesting that the thing that causes gordy to snap is the popping of a balloon.

xps to the anthony lane discussion

Seeing it a second time made the "what did Jupe know when?" questions much clearer. You actually hear the echos of him doing his Star Lasso routine way off in the distance just prior to OJ's first encounter with the alien. (This also explains why his children happened to have alien costumes on hand for the prank a couple of days later.)

For me, the biggest unanswered question from the first viewing was "What was the point of having O.J. construct a replica of the mirror ball thingy from the film set?"

What I is that it was actually just a very subtle bit of characterization, showing that O.J. is not fully invested in the alien plot yet; he'd rather figure out new training methods he can use with the horses to prevent another on-set embarrassment.

You actually hear the echos of him doing his Star Lasso routine way off in the distance just prior to OJ's first encounter with the alien.

Yeah, not to be all "I'm the guy who gets things!" but that was clear to me — you see the lights from the Haywood ranch and you can hear a loudspeaker, he even says, "...every Friday night for six months ..." or whatever. In the moment it's just weird and disorienting because you can't tell what it is, and then the alien comes and the scene moves on. But then when it later shows Jupe doing his bit, with the same dialogue, it's clear that the earlier one was basically a dress rehearsal. And yes, he's been feeding the Haywood horses to the beast, which is why earlier when OJ says something about wanting to buy them back, Jupe does this odd bit of hesitating.

Which is to say, definitely not everything is explained in the movie in a satisfactory way. But also, I think more is explained around the edges than is obvious on first viewing.

Actually that scene where OJ goes out chasing Ghost, sees the lights and hears the PA and then the alien attacks, is a good example of Peele's strategy of showing us things that disorient us and then letting them linger until he eventually circles back and fills in the picture. (The opening of the film with the chimp is Exhibit A.) He just doesn't do the extra bit that hackier genre films do where a character goes, "Oh, so when I saw X happen, what was actually happening was Y."

When I saw the pre-credit sequence, I thought, "OH, this must be the distributor's logo."

Yeah, I was uncertain whether it was part of the movie or not. Very unsettling effect.

I saw it on an actual horse ranch

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FYnBHZhVQAA7XYX?format=jpg&name=large

Every time the horses would be going wild in the movie, the IRL horses would start running around, it was crazy

I thought this was good even though I wasn't smart to understand everything that was going on (metaphor-wise). When we looked up what people are saying I kind of felt that, like "Us," there was just a bit *too much* going on (again, metaphor-wise; filmmaking, police brutality, etc.), and I'm not sure how well it all holds together. I'm also not sure it matters. In the end I liked this better than "Us," loved all the Spielberg references and loved the monster design as something so unfathomable.

I'm gonna say it

Nope > Us > Get Out

I mean the key to the monster design, metaphor-wise, is that its mouth is basically a camera shutter, right?

and/or a butthole

lol

That was in Venus on the Half Shell.

The monster is clearly a jellyfish butthole sand dollar.

Did you guys consider the monster might be us