I’ve read the book…does the film do a good job of it?
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Not yet, but same question as @daneel about it.
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I haven’t read the book but the movie was really really good
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Just watched it, enjoyed it very much!
Though seeing all these movies with Don McKellar are just re-opening the wound that there are no more seasons of Twitch City.
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That is an incredible movie:
You can’t cheat at bingo. If you could, I would, but you can’t. I won because I was lucky… lucky to end up in a town full of losers.
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The Matrix is underrated? It’s so overrated that people forget Dark City existed and was The Matrix but better.
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Hear, hear. I love Dark City. The Matrix was fun, but silly, and not nearly as clever as it thought it was.
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Eh. Based on one viewing of each film, I didn’t think Dark City fully earned its pretensions, while The Matrix’s pretensions were easy to ignore and not be bothered by, as it was basically just a dumb action flick starring Keanu Reeves. I enjoyed both, but enjoyed Matrix just a tiny bit more because while watching Dark City I kept getting distracted by thinking, “You know, they could have done this bit better.”
Sorry, can’t go into more specific detail because I haven’t seen either film since they were fairly new.
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you’re replying to the list-compiler. direct you incredulity toward he who nominated it: @ActionAbe
It was something that happened fairly early in this movie that really failed to suspend my disbelief and I ejected the tape. This was years ago, I don’t remember exactly what it was, but I was like “Really?” and berated my girlfriend for choosing the movie.
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I have mentioned this elsewhere, but the futuristic spell of the Matrix is quickly broken due to the premise that the Matrix’s central circuit is comprised of LANDLINE PHONES.
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I just watched Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Admittedly, I am very tired tonight but I just did not get this at all. I always struggle with films that don’t have a clear narrative structure.
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First time I watched Boonmee was for class, and I also was rather tired and didn’t get it. I gave it another viewing later when I was better rested and thought it was great. Of course, this may not apply to you, since no matter how rested one is, it still doesn’t have a clear narrative structure.
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There’s a restaurant in Montreal called Tampopo, and I had such incredibly high hopes for it, because I loved Tampopo the movie.
unfortunately, the local restaurant seems to be aiming to evoke the early part of the movie, when the noddles are still pretty poor
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This sort of remark always puzzles me. I think of all art as being exercises in formalism, otherwise there would not be anything there to experience. How does one know that they understand the structure, rather than simply assuming that they do? Not unlike guessing whether or not you “really” know another person, there is no way to ever be certain. If I have not experienced a movie, music, sculpture, etc before, then how/why would I know what sort of structure to expect from it?
I know that this is very much a brut/outsider perspective, but it has always seemed to me that reinventing the wheel is a much more obviously creative option in arts and media than establishing any sort of arbitrary convention.
How do people decide whether or not they “get it”?
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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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