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FictionIsntReal

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Posts posted by FictionIsntReal

  1. Posted

    This is something of a tough choice. I don't care for "Harold & Maude", but it arguably set the template for the "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" trope and did it better than its imitators, and that counts for canonicity even if I don't like the results. I like Being There more, but most of the immortal parts of it where already in the book. The movie adds a questionable ending and is arguably distorted by Peter Seller's identification with Chance (who was just Jerzy Kosinski's device for mocking a society shallow enough not to notice what's wrong with him). There's no "neither" option, so I'm simply going to refain from voting, leaving it to everyone else.

     

    Amy, I'm just as unreal & alien as you. Maybe you'd prefer "The Arbalest", which is like a Wes Anderson movie where the protagonist is unambiguously evil, even if he realizes (too late) that he doesn't belong in the life story of the female lead. It was still too Wes Anderson-esque for me, but at least it doesn't require the audience to identify with such a person.

  2. Posted

    This was a good movie, but not really Canonical. It didn't strike me as nearly as subversive as people here make it out to be: there are plenty of movies about a driven man who neglects/harms the woman unlucky enough to fall for him. And it even ends with him beating Minnesota Fats, like a Rocky sequel (I'm going to admit I've only seen the original, "Rocky Balboa" and "Creed", each of which end with the protagonist losing his bout in a dignified manner). The ambiguity of what Gordon said to Sarah didn't work for me either, because she presumably remembered what he said and she decides to sleep with him later (a decision I didn't understand, since she loathes him) prior to killing herself.

     

    There was a lot of talk about how movies existed which don't fit our ideas of the 50s, but to me that just indicates how the next generation put forth an image to contrast themselves with. Of course Leave it to Beaver* doesn't resemble those, because it's a family sitcom and you don't include the cynicism of noir in something like that.

    *Which my dad claims is one of the most realistic shows he's seen, since it resembled his own life at the time.

     

    There was a lot of talk about On the Waterfront, which has not yet been nominated for the Canon. Is that because its inclusion is too obvious?

    • Like 1

  3. Posted

    For me, the film felt like an exciting if anxiety-inducing expression of the pressures of womanhood (the way Lawrence's character constantly subordinates her own desires in order to seem accommodating, her husband's constant dismissal of the things that matter to her so he can following his every whim, the world-weary rage and bitterness of Pfeiffer's character) that doubled as an indictment of human selfishness.

    Interesting you say that, since shortly after watching it I came across an interpretation of Lawrence's character as actually representing selfishness, indicting Javier Bardem's character for the inhuman degree of generosity & forgiveness associated with Christ. A very unusual perspective for most didactic entertainment, but that's part of what makes the film so delightfully atypical! The notion that it was Aronofsky blaming himself for his breakup with Weisz (with his next girlfriend standing in for her) didn't even occur to me, I had previously thought he'd just be sore he lost out to Daniel Craig.

     

    Not having seen Lady Bird (but having heard it's like Margaret but not quite as good), for me it comes down to mother! vs The Florida Project. And as much as I appreciated the former, the latter was my favorite film of the year. The former is a film I'd challenge people who like out there passion projects & the unusual to see, the latter is something I think everyone should see. Perhaps there could be a separate cult canon, but for the regular canon it's The Florida Project. I thought it managed to look at this strata of society without devolving into poverty porn, show things through the eyes of a child without getting mawkish, and get great naturalistic performances from its new leads together with an underplayed Willem Defoe as we rarely see him.

     

    I'm actually surprised The Last Jedi has strong detractors OR proponents. It's another Disney Star Wars which isn't going to rock the boat much either way (despite all the talk about letting the past die). Better than Force Awakens, but that's a very low bar. It really doesn't belong in contention here. I can understand that reaction to Get Out, which was both a hell of a lot of fun and had something on its mind. After that, I wouldn't be surprised if a later film from Peele makes it into the canon.

  4. Posted

    This was a much easier decision for me than others. Holy Grail is THE Monty Python movie. When I first saw it I was angered by the ending, because everything preceding it (including the credits, which at best produce a mild grin in Life of Brian) was hilarious and I was expecting more movie. But merely having the better ending doesn't elevate Life of Brian above it to me. Life of Brian may have something to say, but Holy Grail makes me laugh more. Part of it may be that there's more Terry Gilliam in it. Terry Jones' subsequent directorial career hasn't been nearly up the standards of Gilliam. Grail has multiple animated bits, and they manage to fit in the film because EVERYTHING, no matter how absurd, can go in.

    • Like 1

  6. Posted

    For all the talk about how supposedly inescapable this film is, I managed to escape it all this time without any conscious effort on my part, so I can now blame Weber for getting me to watch it. I suppose it might be impressive to juggle that many storylines, and to Curtis' credit he didn't throw in a hail of frogs, but I don't actually think it does add up to "more than the sum of its parts". Maybe you can't argue with someone's taste reduced to "it's so charming", but I wasn't charmed. I suppose I might be more cynical than average, but over the same holiday weekend I was able to derive some enjoyment from The Shop Around the Corner, and that's had many more decades to get out of date.

    • Like 1

  7. Posted

     

    I felt the same way. Like "Wait, what does Fight Club have to do with anything?" And then I realized that Amy and April consider them both films about masculinity, or just "male-ness" in some way. I actually think Fight Club is the very rare instance of the movie being a little better than the book, but I don't think either one belongs in the canon.

    It's worth noting that both books were written by gay men, although Chuck Palahniuk was not public about it and was greatly upset when he was outed and Bret Easton Ellis says he doesn't like people interpreting his work through that.

     

    I voted yes. With all apologies to Man Bites Dog, this is easily the best serial killer satire. The original novel was quite well known, but the film adaptation has managed to displace it and redefine our image of Christian Bale along the way. I can even detect touches of this in the much more po-faced "Shame" from Steve McQueen (not a bad film, but can't compare to this).

  8. Posted

    A definite NO on this, and I'm somewhat irritated Lambert got me to watch this. I think The Graduate is overrated as well, but it's obviously far more canonical than this (so is Virginia Woolf, which holds up better than The Graduate) and its failings don't make this any better. Yes, the men are more obviously lousy here, but I don't think the film does all that well by its women either, who all have less screentime & dialogue. I don't think Carol Kane gets a single line! Someone above thought it was smart that Candice Bergen doesn't appear after the first segment, but to me it felt like the movie just didn't care enough about other characters and just wanted to focus on Nicholson. Nicholson can be an interesting performer playing unlikeable people, but his schtick gets tiresome quite early here. I'd rather that In the Company of Men get in, which might also be more influential despite being more recent.

    • Like 1

  9. Posted

    I found The Philadelphia Story only mildly amusing. His Girl Friday is the one I'd heard about for years, and it more than lived up to the hype. Like vanveen13, I read it as a story about awful people and the actual merits of the murderer are beside the point (none of the newspeople actually care, and the politicians are hardly better). Bellamy's character can be an entirely decent guy and that's precisely why Hildy doesn't belong with him (since choosing the job over marriage is precisely what caused her to divorce Walter). It isn't a movie about her falling back in love with her ex-husband as much as with the job, and the terrible people doing that job are right where they belong. I don't give The Philadelphia Story as much credit: it seems to side with the father and everyone else complaining about Tracy falling short of the womanly ideal. Imbrie behaves like someone who already knows she's definitely a supporting character because it's more convenient for the writers rather than because that makes sense as a real character. It seems like they couldn't bother fleshing out Kittredge either because the audience already knows she's not going to wind up with him.

    • Like 2

  10. Posted

    Paul Scheer made a surprisingly good argument for including the worst movie in the Canon, almost as a counterexample showing what not to do, but I'm not sure it's actually worse than the films listed here, or countless movies which have appeared on MST3K. It's a relatively popular "midnight movie" now, but it could be very well be displaced by something else in the future and you always say this canon is for "all time".

     

    I saw it with a group of people accompained by Rifftrax and still couldn't even look at the screen at times. The story behind the film and how someone like Tommy Wisseau was able to create it despite all the reasons why it should have never happened is somewhat interesting, but without having seen The Disaster Artist I would still rather rewatch Ed Wood than see that. I would never rewatch The Room, once was too many times already.

  11. Posted

    Perhaps my opinion would be different if this was the first documentary I saw, but instead I just watched it after it was announced for this podcast. The obvious Errol Morris podcast for inclusion is The Thin Blue Line, with Fog of War perhaps being a runner-up. I found the topiary garden material completely uninteresting and poorly fitting with the rest of the film. The Rodney Brooks* material was quite good and he did indeed seem quite perceptive, which just made me wish he had an entire documentary dedicated to him.

    *I'll dissent from Palmatto's description of him as a "loner": he seems to have a team of people he works with. It's just that the film focuses on him as an individual.

     

    I'll concur with those complaining about Brett Morgen as a guest. He hardly talked about the film he was supposed to, only getting to the Interrotron at the very end. Irritating enough that it made me even less inclined to put his nominated film in the canon.

  12. Posted · Edited by FictionIsntReal

    Roger Ebert actually noted the satire in his review:

    "Heinlein intended his story for young boys, but wrote it more or less seriously. The one redeeming merit for director Paul Verhoeven's film is that by remaining faithful to Heinlein's material and period, it adds an element of sly satire. This is like the squarest but most technically advanced sci-fi movie of the 1950s, a film in which the sets and costumes look like a cross between Buck Rogers and the Archie comic books, and the characters look like they stepped out of Pepsodent ads.

    [...]

    Discussing the science of "Starship Troopers'' is beside the point. Paul Verhoeven is facing in the other direction. He wants to depict the world of the future as it might have been visualized in the mind of a kid reading Heinlein in 1956. He faithfully represents Heinlein's militarism, his Big Brother state, and a value system in which the highest good is to kill a friend before the Bugs can eat him. The underlying ideas are the most interesting aspect of the film.

    What's lacking is exhilaration and sheer entertainment. Unlike the "Star Wars'' movies, which embraced a joyous vision and great comic invention, "Starship Troopers'' doesn't resonate. It's one-dimensional. We smile at the satirical asides, but where's the warmth of human nature?"

    I've seen multiple fans of this film point to Ebert as a person who failed to understand that it was satire, but he did. He just didn't like it. And I'm in the same boat.

     

    The lecture in school about how (unlimited suffrage) democracy collapsed is actually in Heinlein's book. His idea that veterans councils gradually re-established order might have been inspired by GIs returning from WW2 who violently overthrew the machine government of McMinn county Tennessee. But as you alluded to, the original "soviets" were "soldiers & workers councils" with grievances over the tsar's (and later, the provisional government's) handling of the first world war, and in Germany the "freikorps" of demobilized veterans were important in putting down revolts near the end of the war and afterward (as well as sometimes participating in putschs themselves).

     

    The most recent Verhoeven films I watched were Soldier of Orange and Black Book, both about the Dutch resistance in WW2. The former is based on the protagonist's memoir, and I would not describe it as "anti-war". It's against the OTHER SIDE, but isn't that generally the case in war? The resistance is highly imperfect and the overall strategic objective they're serving isn't the one they think (the British want to keep the Germans on alert there so they won't suspect the invasion will be elsewhere), but it ultimately seems worth the fight. Black Book humanizes one of the Germans more, and there are attempts made to make a sort of truce between sides rather than engaging in reprisals, and afterward the retribution taken by the victors on collaborators takes on a shameful light, so it's not just "hooray for our side" (although Carice van Houten's protagonist is if anything more idealized than Rutger Hauer's was). There is an airborne bombing in the former movie of the sort Verhoven himself witnessed as a child. Verhoven stated that he greatly enjoyed this time, regarding it as an exciting adventure, and that childish enthusiasm does seem to carry over into his action films.

     

    Rico being a Tagalog-speaking Filipino is relevant to the world depicted in Heinlein's book, because it's a global society rather than a nationalistic one of a fascist state (although one could argue that nationalism simply expanded to include Earth and exclude extraterrestrial species, with the "skinnies" perhaps being analogous to those eastern european states who collaborated with the Germans after being invaded). A lot of people say the casting of actors with limited talent who look like models is intentional, but I say it still results in bad acting. You don't get to make a bad movie and then just say "I meant to do that" as an excuse. Something like Garth Merengi's Darkplace can produce a steady stream of laughs through a mock tv show of poor quality, but Starship Troopers is far closer to just being a mediocre action scifi movie than a comedy.

     

    To me the question of whether Starship Troopers or Robocop belongs in the Canon is a no-brainer: the latter was an enormously successful film (it even had a children's cartoon!) which they tried (and failed) to remake just recently. The former basically ended Verhoeven's career but has a cult following among people who think all the detractors just don't realize it's satire (they should check out The Four-Dimensional Matrix of Starship Troopers Criticism for all the possible evaluations of the film, written by one of its fans).

     

    Amy's comment about Heinlein's fears of the hierarchical Soviet Union reminded me of James Burnham, the ex-communist who joined the anti-communist right. His fellow Trotskyist-turned-anticommunist George Orwell notably criticized Burnham's "power worship" in the aftermath of WW2, but his own writings sometimes seem somewhat Burnham-esque (Asimov thought the society of 1984 was implausibly stable & functional). If you remove Verhoeven's satirical fascism from source material, you still have Heinlein saying it's folly to expect an end to war and that violence was ultimately the solution to Hitler. Hans Morgenthau made a similar sort of argument in the aftermath of the war in Scientific Man vs Power Politics. But afterward the world got peaceful enough that Steve Pinker could write "The Better Angels of Our Nature" on the long-term trend of falling violence which would seem to validate those pre-war optimists Morgenthau criticized.

  13. Posted

    I think the first one solidly belongs in, but not the next two. People remember some gimmicks like the hoverboard, but that's not really enough. Empire Strikes Back didn't get in the Canon, and these sequels are FAR less deserving.

     

    Biff Tannen was named after studio exec Ned Tanen, who greatly disliked Gale & Zemeckis' script for "I Wanna Hold Your Hand".

     

    Inherited wealth does not seem to be that important in the US in the long-term. In early American history there were land lotteries, and the descendants of the winners don't seem to be that different from those who didn't.

    https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/04/22/the-lottery/

     

    Depending on how seriously you take self-reported happiness studies, in 2006 women reported being slightly less happy than men, whereas decades prior they had reported higher levels of happiness:

    http://freakonomics.com/2009/10/14/nickeled-and-dimed-by-barbara-ehrenreich/

    They also note that, more in accordance with our expectations, blacks report higher levels of happiness in later decades.

    • Like 1

  14. Posted

    An interesting case, because while there's lots to talk about, and I think Cronenberg does belong in the Canon, this film is probably not the best example. It's an unusually blunt example of revenge-by-movie where the director gets to vent against his ex-wife and the divorce they went through, but here I'll side with Adam Egypt Mortimer in saying that the "psychotronic breakup film" to watch is Possession.

     

    I find it hard to remember any details about the director's own stand-in because he's so uninteresting. Maybe the reason Art Hindle never became a bigger star is because he doesn't have star quality? I'm reminded that some try to excuse the extreme dullness of the protagonist of Cronenberg's "Scanners" by saying it's because he's so mentally off. I think sometimes Cronenberg didn't care about making interesting protagonists when he could focus on exploding heads or whatever instead. They don't have to be likeable, as James Woods in Videodrome isn't especially. In fact having this from the POV from the ex-wife (a la Carrie perhaps) might have worked better.

     

    This is a film I'm glad I saw, and I'd recommend it to the same sort of horror afficionado who'd want to check stuff off this list, but I don't think it belongs in The Canon.

    • Like 1

  15. Posted

    I heard a lot of hype for this movie and was disappointed when I eventually saw it. Not because of the CGI, which I had no problem with (I actually think the creature looks cool & unique), it's just that the film as a whole was merely good rather than extraordinary. I find Snowpiercer even more overrated, while I like most of Okja EXCEPT Jake Gyllenhaal's performance. Memories of Murder is excellent, though it seems to belong more in a cult canon for people who like Zodiac. Perhaps I'm just too ignorant of Korean cinema, but I can't think of other movies The Host has influenced, and if we wanted to include a giant monster movie there are plenty of them more canonical. If someone asked me if they should see it, I'd say sure, but it's not essential.

  16. Posted

    I have no problem calling this the definitive Argento film. He may have started with non-supernatural giallo films, but he could never really compare to Hitchcock in telling a murdery mystery that makes any sense. Here he leans into the things he's best at. It's not just the best Argento film, or the best Italian horror film (with apologies to Mario Bava), but also probably the most beautiful horror film. And the Goblin soundtrack works perfectly. One possible shortcoming is that it was supposedly written with younger characters in mind, and probably would have worked better that way (setting aside how child actors usually don't work as well, and can be unconvincingly dubbed in other Argento films). The remake hasn't tried going that route, presumably because the original is such a classic that it would seem weird to do it differently.

  17. Posted

    This is an interesting case because, I did not enjoy this movie: even restricting myself to New French Extremity films I'd heartily recommend "Inside" over this, as a much more fun cat-and-mouse game. This is a film about torture (or "suffering", as the director put it) in which, as Amy says, it's entirely desexualized and even made dull & bureaucratic. At the same time, it has set a certain standard for "extremity" in horror films, and done so in a way intended to make the audience think about something rather than merely dwell on viscera. The twists were genuinely surprising, and I cared about the people subject to these fates. But horror filmmakers are always trying to find ways to push boundaries, so I don't know if something else will displace this as The Extreme Horror Movie. If/when that does happen, I probably won't enjoy watching that.

    • Like 1

  18. Posted

    The ephemerality of Castle's gimmicks inherently makes his films less canonical. If directors today were still using his gimmicks then you could argue for influence, but it seems mostly died out, even if the stories are entertaining. And I think if you were going to put a Castle film in, House on Haunted Hill is probably a better bet. At least viewers can see the skeleton on screen as a substitute for the one that would appear in theaters.

  19. Posted

    This is one of the most recent slam-dunk Canon entries I can think of. Immediately afterward everyone was fixated on bullet-time and wire-fu. Plato's Cave is an old idea, but I think this is the most widely known take on it (though people should check out Dark City). You may not like what happened later, but it's undeniable influence makes it canonical.

     

    A little while ago I came across an argument that the film is really all about Neo discovering he's trans, and that reading didn't work for me. That would be a very individual story, but the Matrix contains EVERYBODY. He's discovering the nature of reality, which is more universal. Then I heard a different argument in which it's an allegory, which works better. Then none of the characters have to correspond to actual people (none of whom would be "cis"), but can merely be facets within a person. I'm curious if anyone came up with such an interpretation after the film was first released.

     

    To the Wachowskis credit they did pair back the gunplay significantly in the sequels, knowing that the culture had changed in a short span.

    Did the culture really change that much? I don't think movies overall had less gunplay in the early 2000s than late 90s. I think the trilogy just shifted in a different direction because mowing down redshirts would have come across as been-there-done-that.

  21. Posted

    The guy stumping for Minority Report keeps arguing it's the better film, but is the film good enough compared to the films which haven't made it into the Canon? I don't think so. And Top Gun is clearly the more canonical, quality aside.

     

    I'm not really that impressed by Minority Report as a scifi movie. Spielberg drastically changed the story from Phillip K. Dick's into a much more standard wrong-man action-thriller. It's a decent example of that, but the extra flashy bits on top aren't enough to elevate it above something like The Fugitive. The original story fully commits to the premise, which is the essence of literary scifi. Star Wars is sometimes called a "fantasy" or "space opera", rather than scifi because those are really just trappings put on a more traditional story, and I think that's also the case with Minority Report. There was the suggestion that no scifi is consistent, but many such stories are, whether PKD's or films like Primer, and we can use that standard to criticize the film. I don't merely have a problem with the scifi in it though, there are also character decisions like Burgess' at the end which MAKE NO SENSE.

     

    I find it particularly ironic that the guy stumping for it and giving credit to PKD doesn't seem to know what's actually in the story and confused it with the changes made for the film. The theme of predestination is really central to Dick's story, but the film flinches away from that.

     

    I also thought the film seemed to handwave away everything that happened after PreCrime was dismantled. It was really focused on just the cases involving the central characters rather than society overall. Amy mentioned that the released prisoners will be monitored, but there are new criminals every year who won't be. If this system was really saving hundreds of lives (which would be the case if homicide was abolished) you'd think they'd just come up with extra safeguards from something like the guy in charge deliberately trying to falsify the scenes used as inputs.

     

    I was somewhat surprised there was no discussion of Samantha Morton's performance, which is somewhat more distinctive than Cruise's more standard action hero.

  23. Posted

    I really enjoyed Spielberg's Minority Report at the time, but after reading PKD's "The Minority Report" I'm incapable of respecting the story. The decision made at the end MAKES NO SENSE, and the whole thing is really just a refusal to grapple with the issue PKD did in favor of making a conventional action movie (which it's a fairly good example of).

     

    I think it was the first thing I saw Samantha Morton in. After seeing her mute performance in "Sweet and Lowdown", I'm now curious to hear the voice recordings she made for Spike Jonze's "Her" before Scarlett Johannson redid them.

  24. Posted

    I watched this specifically because of Get Out and was really disappointed. It seemed like a cheap tv movie. The idea and title have cemented their place in pop-culture consciousness, but those are both from Ira Levin's book. Hardly anything from the film itself seems to have endured, or deserved to do so. I don't think I've seen any of Forbes' other films, nor do I intend to. Jordan Peele did a far more impressive job in his first feature than Forbes did relatively late in his career.

     

    Ira Levin may not have been able to personally relate to the situation of women, but another big component of the film is an urbanite's anxieties over leaving downtown for the suburbs. As a lifelong New Yorker, he could have put some of himself into that.

     

    A different Nicole Kidman remake of a scifi horror film* inspired Robin Hanson's post on Pod People Paternalism, but I suppose some of it applies here as well.

    *Thankfully, I've seen neither.

  25. Posted

    It's not "fake news" at all. While Thorpe is painted as the villain, his reporting is depicted as accurate.

     

    The 1980s were the decade with the largest influx of women into the labor force. Some have attributed this to the decrease in marginal tax rates, as they were the marginal workers.

     

    While the presenters preferred the later film, I preferred the first one (even with less Dolly Parton). The fantasy sequences weren't that great in and of themselves, but I liked that the film was willing to do something completely different for a little while. And the bit where Tomlin steals a corpse is one of my favorites. Your guest acknowledges that 9 to 5 had more cultural impact, so for me there's no reason for the choice to be anything else.

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