I've only seen A Bout de Souffle but I don't think Godard is for me.

The trouble with going to see the film everybody is raving about is that now I've seen it, I'll have to listen to everybody calling it the film of the year and that will make me feel alienated from society. Better to not have seen it. This is what a quarter century of shit movies has done to people, so go ahead and strike. Stay on strike.

Steven Spielberg in the 1970s would never have gotten away with making a film where there are no characters, all the action feels pointless and the narrative doesn't make sense. And yet if the Barbie movie were an Adam Sandler film and the feminism was replaced with toilet humour I think the structural issues would be obvious to all.

Also, this is bullshit:

"The map in Barbie Land is a child-like crayon drawing," the studio said. "The doodles depict Barbie's make-believe journey from Barbie Land to the 'real world.' It was not intended to make any type of statement."

Bull. Shit. It's a child-like crayon drawing with ASIA being a picture of a sort of China-shaped blob with the Great Wall on it and a fucking eight dash line roughly where the "nine-dash line" would be. It's very prominent in a number of shots while Barbie blocks most of the rest of the map with her head, and although there are a couple of other random dashed lines going out to sea in other parts of the map to try to pretend that's not what they're doing, it's clearly not an accident. Supporting the PRC's territorial aggression to sell movie tickets, now that's some feminism.

And I haven't even mentioned the product placement. Here we get into the real subtext. Is this scene just a Chevrolet commercial?

Anthony Flack wrote: Sat Jul 22, 2023 6:40 pm The trouble with going to see the film everybody is raving about is that now I've seen it, I'll have to listen to everybody calling it the film of the year and that will make me feel alienated from society. Better to not have seen it. This is what a quarter century of shit movies has done to people, so go ahead and strike. Stay on strike.

I get it. My taste in movies makes "alienated from society" a given. Try getting people jazzed about a Wang Bing doc or a Raul Ruiz, a Hou Hsiao-hsien, or Sokurov flick. Or from the other end of the film world, try to convince regular folk on the merits of something like The Killer Condom, Fleshpot on 42nd St, or Mystics of Bali. It ain't gonna happen! I don't connect with folks I know about this stuff and I just let it be that. This Barbie thing for you will probably be like the Everything, Everywhere, All at Once thing was for me. You'll hear about it from all sides for a hot minute and then it will completely disappear. Nothing has a shelf-life in popular culture these days. Just let it go away and, soon enough, it will be gone.

Anthony Flack wrote: Sat Jul 22, 2023 6:40 pm Steven Spielberg in the 1970s would never have gotten away with making a film where there are no characters, all the action feels pointless and the narrative doesn't make sense.

I know what you mean here, and I doubt this Barbie movies would fit my desire, but the idea of Hollywood making movies, "where there are no characters, all the action feels pointless and the narrative doesn't make sense" has me wishing that I lived in that world. Give me the cinematic experience equivalent of reading Beckett's Watt all day, every day in perpetuity please!

caga tio wrote:Try getting people jazzed about a Wang Bing doc or a Raul Ruiz, a Hou Hsiao-hsien, or Sokurov flick. Or from the other end of the film world, try to convince regular folk on the merits of something like The Killer Condom, Fleshpot on 42nd St, or Mystics of Bali..

Rejoice that none of this will ever be the subject of popular opinion at all!

I just don't know how they get away with it. The worst of it, you know, is that the people who will see through this movie are those that hate its politics, ie. right-wingers. And I don't hate its politics and I do NOT WANT to be in agreement with with right-wingers. Also the China thing is really creepy and insidious because they've pitched it just so that it's definitely there but just disguised enough to pretend like you're crazy if you see it.

On recent flights, I watched The Fablemans (speaking of Spielberg) and Babylon.

The Fablemans was really very good. The scene when the kid sits at his editing deck, going through the footage of his family camping trip demonstrates just how much talent and imagination Spielberg has, which makes it all the more frustrating when he squanders it, as he so often does.

Babylon, on the other hand, sucked. Actually, it did something worse: it had a handful of amazing sequences that hinted at the movie that could’ve been, which made everything else about it more maddening. The movie had a huge amount of talent both in front of and behind the camera, an enormous budget, and a fascinating milieu . . . and it turned out to be the Silent Era as Studio 54. Fuck that.

(Brad Pitt could’ve been a superstar in the 1920s. Unlike Margot Robbie, he looked like he belonged there. Robbie’s performance was genuinely good, but she dressed and talked like she’d come from a different century.)

Wood Goblin wrote: Sun Jul 23, 2023 7:42 am
Babylon, on the other hand, sucked. Actually, it did something worse: it had a handful of amazing sequences that hinted at the movie that could’ve been, which made everything else about it more maddening. The movie had a huge amount of talent both in front of and behind the camera, an enormous budget, and a fascinating milieu . . . and it turned out to be the Silent Era as Studio 54. Fuck that.

I thought Babylon sucked too. A couple of good scenes, but mostly just a overlong mess. It got to where I was going, "is this fucking thing over yet?" It also bummed me out because A) I saw it on my birthday, and B) I really enjoyed Whiplash, La La Land and First Man.

We watched Cha Cha Real Smooth last night. I thought it was a pretty good little post-college-cusp-of-the-adult-world film. To his credit, Cooper Raiff's extroverted character doesn't come off as an unlikeable douche (though I can see why some might think that).

I think if the past 10-15 years of new cinema can teach us anything, it’s that the onus of how to make a good movie won’t easily resolve itself. If anything, judging by what I’ve seen, it might be more elusive now than before, despite touted advancements.

We can have higher-definition video than ever before, more streamlined workflows. We can involve more non-straight white males in the process, have more diversified pools of co-conspirators. There can be a greater sense of political urgency from certain sectors, an unabashed willingness to tackle various hot-button issues head on. There can be a greater propensity for being outrageous, tapping into pulse-pounding dread or letting our freak flags fly in various ways, going down the rabbit hole, getting “meta,” weirdly unpleasant, etc. The lower overhead of many productions can mean we can get more personal and intimate, if need be.

But all of this is for naught if being attentive to the minute-by-minute fluctuations of a narrative and its emotional core isn’t done well, or somehow the whole endeavor is rendered moot on a conceptual level, or the movie is just plain trivial. There’s no short cut around this. No amount of star power or “things looking good on paper” can necessarily cancel it out.

I’d posit that if movies “before” (in general sense) had a tendency to suffer from meaninglessness, now it’s almost as if movies tend to suffer from too much meaning, but it’s of the wrong kind.

Am getting a new TV this week, after holding out with my more compact one for a long time. But I tend to watch movies less and less, it seems. This could just be a phase, but it’s never felt more easy and natural to put off watching things, sometimes even very good things from bygone eras.


This is a brilliant post, it should be re-iterated:

Anthony Flack wrote: Sat Jul 22, 2023 12:32 am The Barbie movie is so bad.

It is essentially a lecture about Barbie and feminism and body image and patriarchy for two hours, while doing sight gags about toys at human scale, a few silly movie parodies and lots of 4th wall-breaking wink-wink stuff. On one level it's like being trapped in a SNL sketch that won't end. On another level it felt like an Ayn Rand novel for Democrats. They're supposed to be dolls but every character is either a straw man or a sock puppet and they're all here to talk to YOU about feminism.

There is some half-hearted attempt to overlay the standard action beats of a Hollywood three-act film over all this but it's beyond flimsy. Oh, we'll get Will Ferrell to do that scenery-chewing cartoon baddie thing he does and he can... whatever. A chase or something. Who cares, not important. Then the ghost of Barbie's creator turns up to provide some additional cultural context because fuck the movie, we've got a thesis going here. By the end the characters are just standing around monologuing the director's blog posts at the audience.

Wondering, as far as apparent feature-length advertisements go, how Barbie stacks up against The Wizard and Mac & Me.

Anthony Flack wrote: Sat Jul 22, 2023 12:32 am The Barbie movie is so bad.

It is essentially a lecture about Barbie and feminism and body image and patriarchy for two hours, while doing sight gags about toys at human scale, a few silly movie parodies and lots of 4th wall-breaking wink-wink stuff. On one level it's like being trapped in a SNL sketch that won't end. On another level it felt like an Ayn Rand novel for Democrats. They're supposed to be dolls but every character is either a straw man or a sock puppet and they're all here to talk to YOU about feminism.

There is some half-hearted attempt to overlay the standard action beats of a Hollywood three-act film over all this but it's beyond flimsy. Oh, we'll get Will Ferrell to do that scenery-chewing cartoon baddie thing he does and he can... whatever. A chase or something. Who cares, not important. Then the ghost of Barbie's creator turns up to provide some additional cultural context because fuck the movie, we've got a thesis going here. By the end the characters are just standing around monologuing the director's blog posts at the audience.

Sounds exactly like what Mattel wanted/needed after three plus decades of being a magnet for politico-socio-cultural debate. Now, everyone can go buy your own girl-empowerment-dolls! And don’t forget, boys can have fun and learn a few things playing with then too! Market. Saturation.

DaveA wrote: Sun Jul 23, 2023 3:19 pm Wondering, as far as apparent feature-length advertisements go, how Barbie stacks up against The Wizard and Mac & Me.

Apart from obviously being a feature-length advert for Barbie (with a dash of "subversion" that is really just constant lampshading), the one that stuck out the most is the amount of shilling they did for General Motors. Of course there's Barbie's miniature pink Corvette, but that is quickly abandoned to showcase the all-new 2024 Chevy Blazer EV SS and GMC Hummer EV. The way they frame the shots when those bad boys are on screen just screams "car commercial".

Anthony Flack wrote: Sun Jul 23, 2023 5:18 pm

DaveA wrote: Sun Jul 23, 2023 3:19 pm Wondering, as far as apparent feature-length advertisements go, how Barbie stacks up against The Wizard and Mac & Me.

Apart from obviously being a feature-length advert for Barbie (with a dash of "subversion" that is really just constant lampshading), the one that stuck out the most is the amount of shilling they did for General Motors. Of course there's Barbie's miniature pink Corvette, but that is quickly abandoned to showcase the all-new 2024 Chevy Blazer EV SS and GMC Hummer EV. The way they frame the shots when those bad boys are on screen just screams "car commercial".

Cross-generational marketing to the parents of kids who dragged them there? Haha.