Dom by filmmaker I meant, basically, director.

Agree. This is an excellent criticism I read of Nolan.


https://psmag.com/christopher-nolan-...7d5#.vr2a5arru

The Corn is Green Bette Davis shows up at a Welsh mining town and, against the wishes of the town leaders, decides to open a school. One of the miners shows promise and she coaches him to eventually apply at Oxford.

This kind of fell flat for me. I'm not sure why. I'm not a huge Bette Davis fan and the plot just didn't work for me, especially the ending.

Mississippi Grind A degenerate gambler crosses paths with a younger gambler motivated less by gambling than pushing the life edge. They decide to get the older man a seat at a high dollar private game in New Orleans, hoping to win the buy-in in smaller games along the way.

I really liked 95% of this movie. The portrayal of the two characters was superb. I'm guessing almost everyone here has seen this but I'll use spoilers anyway.



Barton Fink This was a second watch for me. I remembered not caring for it too much the first time I saw it, so I thought I'd give it another shot. I didn't care for it too much this time either. I'm not entirely sure why. It wasn't a bad movie. It was droll (purposely) but I didn't mind that. I dunno. It just didn't work for me.

This kind of thing makes me rip off my head and run screaming thru the streets with my balls in a fruit pickers pail...

Finally purchased some web hosting in an effort to expand on my podcast. I have many half-written film pieces that I never finished because I did not want to give it away to someone else. I'll continue to record podcasts every 2 weeks, but every now and again I'll throw in an editorial piece, or film review. If anyone is interested in checking it out, thegreenscreenofdeath

I have never run a website, obviously have no experience with design. It's bare bones for now.

De Palma

Documentary on the legendary filmmaker by Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow. All it is is De Palma talking to the camera and talking about every one of his movies in chronological order. With lots of film clips. Turns out, that's all you need! Fantastic and a real treat for cinephiles.

^^body double is a very good movie!

Forgot if I mentioned seeing this. Also saw 3-4 De Palma films I hadn't seen, theater did a mini festival along with Vertigo 70mm (which I still am meh about).

It's pretty cool that he did a number of films that all heavily riff on a different Hitchcock film (often more than one) with modern twists. In most cases they're of comparable quality to the Hitchcocks.

Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, and Body Double is a great stretch of De Palma movies.

Watching Tree of Life and To the Wonder in the space of a week convinced me that Malick is a clueless hack who just got lucky with his earlier films

is there a contest to make the worst possible post that I am not aware of?

Hard to argue with gimmicky. He's definitely getting by on twists more than on developing characters or shooting beautiful scenes. As a result I don't find his films to be very rewatchable. You might run them back once to notice the clues you missed the first time through, but aside from Memento I never find myself pondering an idea that a Nolan film planted in my mind.

That said, I think you're being needlessly rude telling people they belong on IGN. This should be a space in which we can freely discuss ideas and become more perceptive and appreciative viewers of film. If you genuinely think people have missed the boat on something, share your POV with us, don't beat us over the head with it.

Wow. That is a mother****in bingo.

Where did you find this? Didn't see it on Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Comcast...

I really liked Tree of Life.

An Education

This is the first starring role for Carey Mulligan, and it's clear why she is the star she is today. She plays a precocious 16 year old British girl named Jenny in the 1960's. Recently awarded a scholarship to Oxford as long as she maintains her grades at her posh preparatory school, she hasn't ventured outside of her routine her entire life, which includes the cello, Latin, and reading English literature. She has a loving but overbearing family, with a great and funny performance by Alfred Molina as her father.

Enter Peter Saarsgard as David. He's a 30 something year old handsome, fun, sophisticated man who drives a sports car and shows an interest in Jenny. He keeps his distance at first, and the pace of the romance is great, slowly building their budding relationship. There are a couple great scenes of David trying to 'con'-vince Jenny's parents to let her go on vacation with him. She of course is immediately drawn to him, and to the life that he can show her. Her eyes are as wide as can be, and she is drinking it all in like she may not have another chance. In the hands of another actress, this may have come off as cartoonish, or shy, but Mulligan has this quality to her expressions that just exude vibrance, and vitality, so that we are drawn to her like a moth to a flame. 17 year old rbenuck4 would've been completely smitten with her.

She sees herself as sophisticated, sharp, worldly-wise, and knowing what is best for her. Her teachers (and perhaps her parents) see a 16 year naive kid who is cocky and stupid. There's a nice relationship that develops over the course of the movie between Jenny and one of her teachers. At one point, she tries to give the teacher a gift from Paris. Later, she visits the teacher's home. Both of these interactions do not go as planned, but both scenes tell a great deal about these two individuals.

The plot takes a turn that you may or may not see coming, but what's important is that the movie never loses sight of what it truly is. This isn't a movie about two people falling in love. This is a movie about a young girl trying to find her way in this world, and stepping into the deep end for the first time to test the waters.

The movie is actually based on a true story that was written as a memoir with the same name. The name of the movie is very meaningful. This was an education for Jenny. She received her education by going to fancy restaurants, listening to complex music, walking along the Seine in Paris, and then she receives a very different type of lesson.

The movie does everything right. The script (written by Nick Hornby), the style (the 60's have never been so blissfully casually racist), the actors, the pacing, it all meshes to create a film that transcends genres. You can call this a coming of age story. You can call it a romance, or a drama. It doesn't matter what you call it, this movie just works.

I don't get Malick. I've seen a handful of his stuff, including Tree of Life, and each time, I'm expecting my mind to be blown, and I always walk away just confused. Maybe I'm not sophisticated enough for his movies. Maybe I'm too used to conventional movies where the plot has a beginning, middle, and end. Whatever it is, I've never felt completely satisfied after a Malick film. Hiring Sean Penn and having him say 5 words in a movie just seems like a strange choice in editing. Also, there are dinosaurs in the movie. Just saying

Nolan's movies are almost designed for the internet age, with lots of plot to discuss and clues to dissect on internet forums. But he repeatedly fails to get the basics right, like maintaining some narrative rigour or developing compelling characters. It's often hard to care about anyone in a Nolan movie as they're so flat and both brothers are bad at writing dialogue. The characters are more placeholders moving through the story than rounded human beings.

Did you ever get a chance to see the NickNolte documentary where the entire is NN interviewing NN?

Yeah, this is pretty much where I am with him.

Watch Badlands if you don't think you like Malick. It's structurally straightforward and plain excellent.

Yeah, I feel similarly about Malick : I appreciate his cinematography, but not as much the choice of characters, dialogues or at times cheesy themes. Favourite Malick movie : A Thin Red Line

Think the films should best be watched chronologically, because Badlands is by far the most conventional film (its only sorta conventional!). And his movies then get progressively dissimilar from other movies that are out there. Maybe they're your cup of tea, maybe they're not.

Second thing you need to bear in mind is that the movies aren't dissimilar because the guy is just some avante-garde dude who wants to film weird stuff (I cannot stand these types of filmmmakers), he simply has a different perspective on making a movie. He is a philosopher with strong interests in theology, who fell into filmmaking on a whim. He has a Harvard degree summa cum laude, was a Rhodes scholar that he didn't finish it, and then was a professor at MIT. His particular interest was in the meaning of existence/humanity's place in the natural world, heavy stuff. Which is not to say he is like some haughty, stuffy, professor-type -- he is an extremely humble and shy dude who grew up in small towns in the midwest -- it is more to say that he is inquisitive and interested in exploring big, deep questions. Which might be a reason he wanted to pursue filmmaking in lieu of a professorship! And also explains why voiceover plays such a key role, because he cares quite a lot about the inner dialogue of human beings.

For some additional perspective, he loves the natural world -- much like the philosopher he was particularly interested in, Heidegger -- and there's a great vignette that Nick Nolte told about The Thin Red Line (one of many great Malick stories I've heard over the years) where they have this super expensive production, famous actors on set, and they're filming a scene, and Malick notices this interesting tree, and pretty much halts production and him the cinematographer film it for 20 minutes from all different angles. A very unconventional filmmaker indeed!

So as you go from Badlands, which is a fairly conventional story to Days of Heaven to The Thin Red Line to The New World and then culminating in The Tree of Life (his movies since Tree of Life have been kinda unfocused - he has admitted as much - definitely skippable imho), I think you can come to appreciate his view on the world and the types of films he is making and themes he wants to convey.

As an addendum, with The Tree of Life in particular, I think to really appreciate the power of the film, you have to realize this is not just a random story with some nutty creation scene thrown in. This is essentially an autobiographical story of Malick's life, and Sean Penn (the architect) represents Malick struggling, drifting in adulthood. At the center of the film is the suffering of his family after an unexpected tragedy, the suicide of his brother. Malick's real life brother was a guitar player (you see the guitar in his brother's room in the film) who committed suicide in Spain. As you see in the movie, the parents are notified via telegram of his death very near to the beginning of the film. So you have this very, very real trauma (particularly for his mother) as the center of the story. The movie opens with a quote from the Book of Job, and that book deals with perhaps the biggest question that weighs on theologians, reconciling the benevolence of the creator with massive suffering in the world. And Job is lamenting that very subject, and God obliquely answers him with among other things the quote that opens the film, "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?" This is then paralleled with the mother character in the film pleading with God about why he has allowed her son to die. And Malick is attempting, with an absurdly intricate, time-consuming, and expensive scene, to answer his own mother, as God answered Job, about his brother's death. But God does not answer Job directly, nor can Malick even begin to justify to his mother her own grief. He instead creates the entire universe from scratch complete with the Lacrimosa playing in the background, to mimic's God answer that you are a mortal, and cannot begin to comprehend my omnipotence and everything involved in creating this complex world. And then the movie sort of does a poetic dance of Malick growing up, very much in tune with Christian theology, about the duality of beauty and harshness (grace & nature), and how they're intertwined, even intertwined within his own family. Yes, evil exists, natural order exists, death exists, but this is counterbalanced by an infinite beauty & love that we are witness to in our lives. So that's what The Tree of Life is about that some may miss, divinity, human suffering, and Malick's reconciliation of the two within his own life.

I believe his mother and father were able to see the first screening of The Tree of Life...his mother passed a short time afterwards.

Anyway, if you couldn't tell, he is by far my favorite filmmaker. I've only just scratched the surface of Malick here...people far smarter than I have devoted serious scholarship to the topic, so even beyond the intricacies and weightiness of the themes, I think one reason to love Malick is the visual imagery and his outstanding choice in musical accompaniment.

Planning to see Moonlight tomorrow. La la land looks amazing as well. Looking like a great year for film.

great post domer.

I was never a huge malick fan tho I did quite like the thin red line and always appreciated the beauty of his films, but you've inspired me to give his films another look.

cheers.