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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Speaking of Argento, I haven’t seen any of his work for a long time, but had a chance to see Phenomena again a few months back, and it held up much better than I remembered. I hadn’t liked it much back in the day, but it was probably the badly-cut Creepers version I had seen. The story is fairly easy to follow for Argento, although the main character’s ability might still beg disbelief from some. While feeling more coherent, it also paradoxically felt like one of his “dreamiest” films.
For a straight-up giallo which is damn peculiar, I recommend Giulio Questi’s La morte ha fatto l’uovo, aka Death Laid an Egg. It involves a love triangle at a farm which is developing mutant chickens. The wild score is by Bruno Maderna!
Two of my favourite underrated-to-complete-obscurity films:
Awesome Stephin Merrit soundtrack, and Patricia Clarkson at her best. Funny, dark, heartwarming.
Patricia Clarkson again, but this time with Peter Dinklage. Fantastic character piece; one of those movies where nothing much happens, but you wish it could go on for days just so you get to spend more time with those characters. Beautifully subtle in what it does.
Love, love, love the The Station Agent. I’d been neutral about Bobby Cannavale up until this movie, but he really shines in this movie. And as expected, Dinklage and Clarkson were excellent.
It’s a genuine contender for pole position on my list of all-time best films.
And re: the subtle things…notice the bit where they’re walking the right of way, and the other characters are awkwardly hopping up and down over the railway sleepers, but Peter Dinklage is smoothly cruising along due to his shorter stride? It’s the one place where he fits.
Any other director would’ve made a big deal of that. In this, it’s a second’s worth of unremarked background detail.
Station Agent is a good one. it was kind of like a Jarmusch film, for the reasons you mention, but not to the extent that it seems like a copycat at all.
