Underrated and overrated films (and other general filmy chat)

Like if I went to a lecture in physics that was well beyond my level - I could in theory sit and listen and take in the experience as it is, but I’d probably be aware that there was an intent in those noises I was hearing to convey some sort of information that I wasn’t understanding.

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Of course - but with physics, one could confirm whether or not they understand what is presented by testing it. With aesthetics and storytelling, I am not convinced that this works the same way.

What if I simply decide that I understand something simply because it appears to coincide with the criteria I brought? Or if I decide that I don’t understand it because of pragmatic uncertainty? My guess is that it is usually a simple presumption of shared context, despite knowing that the sharing of context can never be truly demonstrated. And this is not even getting into other factors such as whether or not the artist was skilled enough for their actual intentions to be accurately translated into the medium, or the possibly contradictory intentions of art-by-committee.

It seems to me that ambiguity is built into the universe, as well as our selves. So any signal can easily inspire a huge proliferation of possible interpretive meanings. Picking one’s favorite might well be legitimate, but I am doubtful about there ever being one valid interpretation which people somehow share. It seems more probable that people don’t know much about each other, but prefer to assume that they do because they derive some comfort from this. So people reflexively act as if there is shared context even if and when they cannot demonstrate this.

But my outlook that people are fundamentally unknowable to each other might simply mean that I am really annoying!

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Well, in the physics example you could believe on very good authority that you aren’t understanding it properly. With art people are just describing having that subjective experience. Feeling like you don’t know what is going on is how you know whether you “get it”. When people start saying to other people that they don’t get it, that’s something else.

I think it’s something people just expect you to be able to relate to. Sometimes you experience art and feel like the intended meaning from the artists is pretty obvious. Sometimes you experience art and don’t feel concerned about the intended meaning, just taking it as it is. Sometimes you experience art and somehow it just seems like you know the artist was trying to do something but you have no idea what it was.

I can reliably get the first experience from busts where I (rightly or wrongly) presume the intent was truly to create a good likeness of the person. I can reliable get the second experience from abstract sculpture, whether I like it or not. I can reliably get the third experience from poetry.

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Well, sure. If you’ve never seen a wheel before, and you manage to reinvent it, then you’re arguably as creative as the prehistoric person who first realized that rolling a heavy thing on a log was easier than just dragging it. So congratulations, reinventer: you’re creative! But when you show off your creation to the world, you can expect Gilligan’s reaction:

All very well and good if you’re just creating to satisfy your own creative urges, but if you want an appreciative audience, it might be nice to give 'em something that’s maybe not too overly familiar. Which is sort of a counterpoint to being way out in the avant garde as well. Being stuck in a conventional rut is a different problem than reinventing the wheel due to a rejection of formal history, but both strike me as potential wastes of time and energy that might not be worth the risk. Or might be, I dunno. But a lot of emotional response can be effected through use of popular conventions; the shorthand offers communicative efficiencies that cannot be ignored (which is why we bother learning languages rather than constantly grunting at each other).

Obviously depends on the people and the concept in question. I am reminded of the time I watched Fargo. I was in Colorado, working on the ABC-TV miniseries version of The Shining, and a bunch of us in the crew went out one Saturday to see Fargo when it came out. I’d never seen a Coen Bros movie before, and was looking forward to it. But then I kinda hated it. Which normally wouldn’t have bothered me, except nearly everyone else in our party absolutely loved it. It was pretty disorienting. Many of these people were longtime friends of mine, whose tastes and opinions I trust and value and generally share… but they all thought Fargo was one of the most delightfully funny things they’d ever seen, whereas I found it unrelentingly grim and predictable and dull, and nearly all the characters (except for Marge Gunderson) make the most infuriatingly stupid decisions. Other than the wood chipper (which elicited a chuckle from me, and hearty guffaws from Stephen King), I didn’t like any of the movie… but as the years went on and I saw and appreciated and even loved several more Coen Bros movies since then, I still don’t “get” why everyone thinks Fargo is such a goddamned masterpiece. I bought the DVD ten years ago so I could rewatch the movie and try to figure this out, but I have yet to bring myself to tear off the shrinkwrap.

But I really feel I need to know why.

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I could explain it to you, but I don’t think you’d get it.

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This is actually making me think of this thread:

Specifically the thing about how we mostly don’t realize how close we are to making tragically bad decisions. I think the infuriatingly stupid decisions is the thing that people like. Well, that and Marge, who is just spectacular.

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I guess it must be. The pathos of all those poor chuckleheads making all the wrong decisions… I dunno, part of me thinks it sees how and why so many people find that sort of thing hilarious, but another part of me just fills with revulsion or sadness or frustration or something at such a sight. I had several older siblings, and I watched them make lots of mistakes while growing up, and I never enjoyed the sight and always tried to learn from those mistakes so as not to repeat them myself. (Can you tell I have a special aversion to reinventing the wheel?)

I have a weird relationship toward compassion. I have a pretty dark and irreverent sense of humor in the abstract, so I can laugh at my great-great-aunt who drowned in an outhouse cesspit, in part because I never met her and I have no emotional bond with her whatsoever. But when it comes to people I know, or even just people I see (including fictional characters in movies as well as people in tragic news stories), I hate to see anything bad happen to them, especially when it’s preventable. I rarely got into fights as a kid, and when I did I typically didn’t fight back, simply because I didn’t want to hurt anyone, even if I was getting pounded by some asshole bully twice my size. It’s just always been hard for me to enjoy the suffering of other people, even if, on some level, a case can be made that they richly deserve it. I can’t watch comedians bomb onstage, I can’t watch spelling bees, I can’t even enjoy the British version of The Office because it’s too uncomfortable to be funny for me. And for whatever reason, Fargo fills me with that same “oh shit bad decision coming up, they’re really gonna regret this” dread.

Yes, she is. Were it not for Marge, I’d have walked out. She was great.

This keeps me up nights. More nights than I can afford.

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well, these are the arguments that make up a fair amount of an art student’s classroom time. in the classes of the given medium, everyone does the assigned project and the day the project is due is critique day or “crit,” where everyone presents their piece and the class philosophically analyzes it. historical and contemporary art perspectives are going to come up of course, but fresh critiques reflect favorably on the speaker and the artist can of course defend any strategy they were trying for (though a “new” strategy is usually going to unintentionally be “re-inventing the wheel” at our current stage of art history, but you have to try/figure it out for yourself or else nobody’d ever do anything.) then everyone tries to hash out if the artwork “succeeds” as a whole or not. and then there are whole classes that are just theory; you don’t make anything, you just talk this way about contemporary works for hours at a time.

there’s no right or wrong answers, but because this type of scrutiny is baked into the process gets charlatans and underachievers laughed out of the room (unless, of course, that’s what you were going for, in which case your game better be super-tight.)

anyhow, this doesn’t answer your question except to say that there is no answer and that the process and the debate are the only things you can hope to hang “success” on. this is why modern art is so weird, but can be so rewarding when somebody nails it. this is also why it seems like a giant circle-jerk from the outside: it more-or-less has to be or else everyone is just re-hashing the past or simply making pretty pictures [not that there’s anything wrong with that /costanza]. I know we’re talking film but your post took me straight back to art school. you really ought to audit a class, popo, I think you’d be good at it.

adding that I agree with what @anon50609448 and @Donald_Petersen wrote.

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This is basically why I stopped watching Sienfeld. Almost all the plots boiled down to, one of the leads does something selfish and then later suffers for it.

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How about unreleased films? While looking for something else I stumbled over the story of Seance, an unreleased movie from 2001 starring Adam West and Corey Feldman that’s now available on YouTube.

Hat tip to Andrew Ducker who hosts a daily roundup of interesting links (and accompanying discussion.)

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(spoilers ahead, for old movies)

There’s stupid decisions and there’s bad decisions. People making bad decisions aren’t a deal-breaker for me, but it really depends on how those decisions work with their established character. I liked Fargo - it’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but you could see how William H Macy’s character was an underachieving striver, who’d made some plausible bad decisions (basically stealing from the company he worked for) and that spun out of control as he tried to avoid facing the consequences. It felt believable - he made dumb bad decisions, but I bought that he thought he was acting sensibly, trying to stay out of jail, trying to avoid being found out and humiliated.

On the other hand, you’ve got Arrow (the tv series) where everyone’s super power is apparently to make the worst possible decisions in all cases, for no damn reason except to create conflict. I can’t believe I wasted the hours to watch an entire season - apparently I also make stupid decisions

I’m going to call out Dr Horrible here (i watched it again over the weekend and oh my god I still love it) - the entire 45 minute show consists of the main character making a single decision, and chosing completely wrong. And it’s perfect. Everything about his conflict and his choice feels believable and tragic.

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For a summer camp out here in China, I’m supposed to show a (roughly) ten minute clip from an American film or TV show and then say something about it. All of my suggestions were eventually shot down and my boss assigned me Home Alone. Which I’ve just seen for the first time.

All too brief nice moments from Roberts Blossom and John Candy, but otherwise really painful. I think I Spit on Your Grave made me feel better about humanity.

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So I just watched Mutant Girls Squad and yeah this is not a good film but OMG is it an awesome and insane film.
If you have not seen anything from Sushi Typhoon you are missing out on some of the most over the top splatter insanity ever.

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Easily my favorite of Francis Ford Coppola’s works is The Conversation. Hardly anybody ever mentions it, so I guess it is underrated. Amazing sound design and mix by Walter Murch. It’s a character study about performing and living in surveillance, which I think is as relevant now as ever.

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I wish I could give you more than one like for this. I saw The Conversation in the theater when it came out, and the audience was unusually quiet as they left. The movie bugged me for years afterwards.

Has The Brothers Bloom been mentioned yet in this thread? Somehow I missed it when it came out, and only just saw it for the first time. The movie was really really good until the last 10 minutes or so; Rian Johnson couldn’t find an ending commensurate with the rest of the movie. All the acting was good, but Rinko Kikuchi (best known for depressing Fargo sequel Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter) stole the movie even though she had no actual lines.

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Oh, bravo, sir. Bravo.

:^)

yeah, The Conversation was awesome.

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I was flipping thru the channels last week and on one of the cheap-assed, fly-by-night, glitchy OTA stations there was something in Italian. I stopped, and as I watched, it became clear that this was pretty advanced filmmaking. The dude in it looked kind of familiar, somehow. The station’s hardware kept glitching and the English overdub kept going in and out. I had my suspicions, and when I saw the color of the blood, I knew it was Argento.

It was Profundo Rosso. The overdubs weren’t glitching, it was actually filmed half in English and half in Italian. The dude was familiar because he was the guy from Blow-Up.

I missed a fair bit of the first part but kept watching until the end. It requires a lot of suspension of disbelief, but I was definitely on board. I’m not really interested in horror or shock, but just the way Argento speaks through his camera is profound, irrespective of the type of story being told. Personally, I was into the quality of the film stock, how it informed the sort of sleepy 70s Italian vibe, and the session musicians on the score were laying down some heavy funk that didn’t really go with a horror/suspense story at all, but captured me in regards to how it played off the aforementioned visual elements, and also in-and-of-itself. so, once again, mis-en-scene carries the day.

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I have always thought that, in many ways, Profondo Rosso is Argento’s all-around best movie. And perhaps Goblin’s best score, although that’s a closer call. I got to hang out with Dario Argento for an afternoon in my teens and talk about film, creative process, and other things. He also invited me to a party that night but I was crushed that I couldn’t go.

My impression of classic Italian cinema is to just go along for the ride for its imagination and style. Those who need a lot of help with suspension of disbelief will probably hate it. I think of it as pop surrealism. FFS, Fulci’s zombies can teleport.

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I was struck by how the musician and the journalist have this bubbly, fun, sort of “His Girl Friday”-type of interraction, and then there are also really intense scenes where people are shown getting killed in the most gruesome ways. It doesn’t really follow, but the strength of the total package allows it, I guess.

I also really enjoyed the shot that scrolled along the handwritten sheet-music as the notes played, that was soon after I tuned in and it really triggered my “better settle in for this one” sense.

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Generally, at this time in Italy, everyone (at least all the major performers) would have performed their roles in English, if at all possible. But, Italian cinema of this period was almost uniformly re-dubbed in post. There were two different cuts prepared of Profondo rosso, the full length Italian language version and a cut English version prepared for export. (This English version would also be later cut further by distributors and/or censors.) Despite the fact that the scenes were most likely originally filmed in English, there is no usable English-language audio for the scenes which were never part of the original English language version.

This is why the version you saw flips back and forth between Italian and English. They’re trying to present the longest version available and show it to you in English, but they have no choice but to resort to Italian for certain scenes.

It’s one of my very favorite films, extremely highly recommended. Also, since you liked the soundtrack, I highly recommend you hunt down the soundtrack to Suspiria, Argento’s next film. I think the movie is just a tad below Deep Red in quality, but I think the soundtrack is an improvement.

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