TÁR, the cancel culture conversation piece of the year starring Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss and directed by Todd Field

Twitter doing what it does best:

Emily in Paris is a confusing show. What's her deal? Why is everyone in love with her? Why isn't the clear sexual tension between her and the handsome French woman she works for getting resolved?

— Lydia Tár (@LydiaTarReal) December 27, 2022

lol

Thanks for the Zadie Smith piece, insightful and interesting although we got different things from the film.

that's a great essay. curious if there was anything in particular she said that you took issue with, or if she just was elucidating things you hadn't yet considered (this was my feeling, in some respects)

i thought her suggestions about generational divide and of Tar as Gen-X exemplar were ideas i hadn't much thought about beyond her reflexive hunt for youth

I was. I adore those little creatures. https://t.co/XSasH9fRIT

— Lydia Tár (@LydiaTarReal) December 27, 2022

that Lydia Tar account is a good follow

If you see the whole movie as a comedy that solves the supposed riddle of the “totally different tone” of the postscript some have written about (it is not at all a shift in tone).

the shoes in the bathroom moment is one of the funniest things I've ever seen

didn't read the zadie smith piece but "lydia tár is gen x", tho true, strikes me as a boring thesis (like all other generational analysis)

one great comedic scene was when tár is commiserating with her older composer friend julian glover about cancel culture, but then he goes too far bemoans the denazification of classical musical and she calls him out on it

Saw this today. (I think it might have screened here a couple of months ago, but I didn't know a thing about it and skipped it.) It wasn't quite as involving as I'd hoped it would be, but I thought it was impressive (didn't care much for In the Bedroom at the time). I'm not sure it needed to take quite so long to get to where it was going, but I'm also glad such a film can get made and released in the Marvel moment, so I'm fine with that. My two favourite moments were at opposite ends of the spectrum: the Leonard Bernstein clip, and Lydia's reaction, and then the Spinal Tap ending.

I really loved that zadie smith essay

one great comedic scene was when tár is commiserating with her older composer friend julian glover about cancel culture, but then he goes too far bemoans the denazification of classical musical and she calls him out on it

"he never signed his letters heil hitler, even the ones to hitler"

scorsese is a gamer

Martin Scorsese: The ‘Clouds Lifted’ for Cinema’s Future When I Saw ‘TÁR’ https://t.co/3UVNBruC5E pic.twitter.com/uBNeD4apOd

— IndieWire (@IndieWire) January 5, 2023

Wait till he watches Barbie next year

— Nandini's Gay Best Friend in PS1 (scenes deleted) (@SilamSiva) January 5, 2023

This is now available for rent on Amazon, so I'm thinking I'll check it out this weekend.

hit me up to get on my plex ring and watch it tonight!

Cate Blanchett ... said that “Todd is the type of director you go on a hike with, and he’d warn you that you almost definitely encounter a bear, and there’s a strong possibility that you might lose a limb or part of your face, and you find yourself really excited. Bears? Fuck yeah!”

In her interview with Adam Gopnik.

gopnik? fuck no

Meaning Cate was interviewing him as herself while he was playing another character in a film called Rat

Watched it yesterday and liked it with reservations.

The first couple scenes almost threw me off. I think it's only with the Julliard scene that Lydia really appeared to me as a character. She felt real enough to me as a high achiever who had to harden and become isolated in exchange for success (in the classic Faustian pact), especially as a woman in a traditionally male role. I guess a lot of the irony in the film comes from seeing her exposed and vulnerable even as she makes very big human blunders. It comes from seeing her struggle to reconcile her ideals about music, all the while behaving in a nasty, insensitive, or cruel manner, or just being generally unbearable. There's a couple of key scenes like when she speaks to the child, where it's so inappropriate, and yet maybe you still can't entirely condemn her for her dog-eat-dog approach, unless you want to become the assistant and others who have made a definitive opinion on her and are craving not unegoistacally for her downfall, for the pleasure of seeing someone fall.

I thought it was unsatisfactory to see the central unpleasant climatic part so hurried, it feels like all the tension collapses in one big crash, with Lydia unraveling from one scene to the next, her partner turning against her quite abruptly, some events and the roles of the assistant and Olga left mostly implicit, and I found the epilogue entirely dispensable. As far as I'm concerned, the film could have ended with her pushing the rival off the podium and being forcibly removed. Maybe more minor points, but some of the erudition was distracting, Cate Blanchett sometimes stretched credibility by appearing so... "out of it" (was clearly intentional though). On the positive side, definitely the Stalker-like scene in the Berlin squat, and some of the humor (the German neighbor, CB and her German antiques and the musicians making faces).

Overall rather intriguing and through-provoking.

Oh and obviously you see from miles away what's going to happen, no suspense and all inevitability there, CB is going blindly into it.

loved this movie. i disagree that the epilogue was dispensable -- the ending was one of my favorite moments. i like that the movie was a tragedy in the classic sense. her idealistic, even romantic commitment to music as a way of preserving and transforming historical memory really was valuable. it wasn't just stodginess or conservatism. but she was a poor spokesperson for her ideals becuase of her personal failings, her narrownesss and egotism in her personal life which is actually really different from the way she seemed to approach music.

I think I get the point of the epilogue: "Hoffnung stirbt zuletzt", there's an afterlife where she manages to continue her job outside of the spotlight, a way out from a suffocating milieu. A favorite moment though ?

I read the screenplay over the weekend, and it's a good way to revisit the film. Field is so specific with status details that a reader learns details that flew by (plus the suggestion of several moments from a redhead's POV, the suggestion of Krista).

As I mentioned above, I loved the ending just for its humour; it really did make me think of Spinal Tap playing that military base.

the ending is genuinely and generously funny and invites you to go back and note what else was probably actually p funny when it originally struck you as merely odd (the seinfeld puffy shirt)

onstage tackle is kinda just another thing that happens (seemed tres kubrick to me in the way it always does when people get into clumsy+desperate fights at the end of 3hr movies filmed in glacial longshot, but am i only thinking of barry lyndon?) fishbowl scene in epilogue otoh structurally necessary bc it's when she sees herself + the mechanism she is part of, stripped of obfuscatory questions about aesthetics, and even of the illusion of her own independence, since her existential heroism turns out to slot so neatly into the consumer-role of the most direct and open exploitation.

monster hunter scene a perfect vision of personal hell (the timing of the assistant popping up w headphones tho: you cannot start without me!) and her self-possessed dignity as she burns in it is also perfect.

krista's lil ghost-cameos v effective. slatepitch about it-was-a-dream theory valuably excavates those five or six frames of krista lurking in the background of tar's apartment which i 100% missed, but gets distracted Figuring Out Plot and doesn't bother praising the lovely irony of this section wherein tar's convo w julian glover about schopenhauer ("it was unclear that this private and personal failing had anything to do w his work") is followed immediately by a montage of tar's own work being literally, physically, audibly haunted by her own private and personal failings-- including the bit where not only does the (real or imagined) siren she keeps hearing inspire her own (blocked) composition but also its extreme distance inspires her (unblocked) interpretive decision to move the trumpeter back into the booth for her mahler recording-- an idea mark strong of course keeps when he records it himself.

(+ since as slate piece also points out this sequence of her at work is implied to be happening at more or less the time of the suicide, it's possible tho unnecessary to believe the inspirational siren is not only real but actually krista's)

(or maybe not cuz i forget who's in which city.)

might need to revive the ILX classic term "challenging opinion" for the "ACTUALLY TAR is a comedy" crew

banned for telling the truth

in our time

Dude it genuinely is funny. The tackle is funnier than it is shocking.

oh i also rly love the last line-- def wouldn't prefer any other line in the movie in its place. brothers and sisters of the 5th fleet.

But then I find diarrhea funny so take that for what it’s worth.

when yr seated watching tar and the siren's not so far

just because a movie is funny doesn't mean it's a comedy

i don't really know what my argument is here except that i don't really feel like this movie has one clear-cut genre so calling it a comedy feels reductive

think treesh is otm that it is a classical tragedy (tho we may differ on her Flaw). it's v funny tho yes.

No interest in seeing this movie but always lots of interest in reading Zadie Smith essays, so thanks for that one, it was good

stuff in the smith essay about identity and individualism and ~freedom~ v good+insightful and hits central questions of the movie, with all of its ironies about being (earnestly) ordered by an egotist to "sublimate yourself", or being (literally) elected to something as socially constructed as celebrity and still (correctly) believing "it's not a democracy", but unsure "x vs millennials" is actually the main historical application of these questions, or that they will disappear when everyone has forgotten who thurston moore is

A lot of the recent trajectory of reactionary centrism, which tends to skew towards Gen X and younger boomers, can be seen in this chart. pic.twitter.com/eV1XF7KUYr

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) December 30, 2022

Oh and obviously you see from miles away what's going to happen, no suspense and all inevitability there, CB is going blindly into it.

I mean, if you saw her history and her name coming -- which is as much of a dramatic revelation as the present-moment plot -- then kudos.

the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward monster hunter

YOU DIED

a world of npcs

https://i.imgur.com/qMMPcb9.gif

think treesh is otm that it is a classical tragedy (tho we may differ on her Flaw). it's v funny tho yes.

Saw this today, without much prior knowledge. I think I thought Julian Glover was dead, because I kept watching his scenes and going, gosh this man is like a very old Julian Glover. Also he was giving a very 'natural' performance, as if he was another non-actor from the classical world. A long way from Quatermass and the Pit, anyway. Or is it??!@@

Enjoyed how much there was abt the business mechanics of the classical world - meetings, assistants, patronage, publicity, charity boards etc. Also v good on the hierarchies of eminence and status and charisma that are coded into terms like 'soloist', 'first violin' etc.

I don't recall Varese ever being debated in an American movie before.