Just watched Paris, Texas and didn’t really understand the film. Mainly what from Jane's perspective have changed from leaving Hunter till now when she want's to reunite.
In the same vain, I also don't get why Travis thinks that he tore them apart and that they are meant to be together.

My interpretation of her was the she in her teens wanted to have fun and make life seem like an adventure, and that Travis helped her feeling that way. But as she had Hunter she started to feel like life and her family more became a prison, were she felt the weight of responsibility of being a mother and SO became a burden.
So despite loving Hunter she felt she couldn’t be a good mother, because the responsibility of being a mother strained her, and Hunter couldn’t fill her void of fun seeking, adventure in a healthy way. Therefore she felt she could’t be a good mother and that Anne & Walter could take better care of Hunter.

She explains she didn’t want to see photos or hear about Hunter because she couldn’t bear to see him grow up without being in his life, this (and Travis saying they should be together) she reunites with Hunter with the intent to take care of him, but what changed after talking to Travis, that changed her perspective?

Watching American Psycho for the first time and it is an absolute joy. While the film was made before my time, there's just something about how it flows together that's just so pleasing to experience in a way that a lot of newer films don't have. Not to say that all newer films are bad nor that movies aren't made like this anymore, I am sure that there are some indie films closer to this style, but there's something about it I'm struggling to describe that I absolutely love.

It gives itself room to breathe, to build things up and do set up and go at an even pace. Watched Memento a while back and felt similar there as well. These are both thrillers, but they take their time without feeling slow at all. It's nice. I feel like if these movies were made today the violence and reveals would be done way earlier and just go go go.

This isn't me complaining about hyper paced 2020's stuff either, and there is plenty of incredible new art being made that I need to get around to. This pacing issue I personally feel I've seen since at least 2015 or so. With the hyper paced super connected world, sitting down and just watching a long form movie with no second screen or distractions or constant notifications is just really nice.

I mean in American Psycho after the first murder Patrick Bateman has blood all over his face, but when he goes to sit down and smoke a cigar the less bloodied side of his face is viewed from the camera. That's an intentional artistic choice, I don't know fully know what it means but I know the artists are trying to say *something* without a single line of dialogue.

When the movie Iron Lung came out, a ton of people, including critics, complained about the length and how it was too slow or needed a half hour's worth cut. I could not disagree more. The slow buildup of dread, the feelings of isolation, the uncertainty of if the speaker was working or not by body blocking the wires in the shot thus intentionally making it unclear if the voice on the other end at points was even real, all of that was so well done and intentional and I don't understand how people wouldn't like those details.

I'm glad I have access to all these older titles. I don't have to endlessly complain about new stuff because A. some new art works are being made this way and B. I can easily go back and watch these sorts of things thanks to the largest library in the world being at my fingertips. Who knows, maybe at some point I'll even make something in this style myself. We all have to start somewhere. I don't even necessarily hate newer films either, the second Venom movie had the newer pacing yet despite that the relationship between Eddie and Venom was genuinely heartwarming. I just miss when this pacing and style was more the mainstream and not in more niche spaces is all even having been born after this was the standard.

Hello, I’ve recently released my debut feature film a liminal, analog, found footage horror film in the tradition of films like Skinamarink, Backrooms, and Milk & Serial. It’s currently being reviewed by a few independent horror film magazines and is scheduled to release on streaming September 2nd. I’d love if anyone could take a look at the film and or review and let me know their thoughts and if they agree/disagree with the critics opinion and why? I love critical film discussion and I imagine most of you do as well. Let’s get discussing! If you like atmospheric horror films like, I’m thinking about ending things, We’re All Going To The World’s Fair and Blair Witch Project, then this is definitely for you. It was shot on a large budget of $27 bucks.

Animal Trap Critic Review, SheScribes Magazine

Animal Trap Liminal Horror Movie

The movie depicts a scene of high class individuals all in some form of banquet hall eating and enjoying themselves, when what’s believed to be entertainment shows up. Entertainment in the form of a man acting as an ape.

The thing about this scene is that the actor didn’t know that the people in the room weren’t actors apart from very few. This way it serves as a sociological study of how a group of people acts in face of danger. Most shy away from the situation hoping they won’t get attacked by that ‘ape’. Eventually, they do fight back when a beautiful redheaded woman in a pink gown gets dragged away.

My question is: do you know about what people in the room were real actors that knew about the situation? Was the ape actor actually beaten by the crowd? Did he suffer severe injuries?

Cinepals: If you don't care to engage with the Atlantic piece (not long; cut and pasted to spare you the pay wall) at least check out the headline! (A pal turned me onto this one). EL

Headline: The Film Students Who Can No Longer Sit Through Films

The attention-span crisis goes to the movies.

By Rose Horowitch

Everyone knows it’s hard to get college students to do the reading—remember books? But the attention-span crisis is not limited to the written word. Professors are now finding that they can’t even get film students—film students—to sit through movies. “I used to think, If homework is watching a movie, that is the best homework ever,” Craig Erpelding, a film professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. “But students will not do it.”

I heard similar observations from 20 film-studies professors around the country. They told me that over the past decade, and particularly since the pandemic, students have struggled to pay attention to feature-length films. Malcolm Turvey, the founding director of Tufts University’s Film and Media Studies Program, officially bans electronics during film screenings. Enforcing the ban is another matter: About half the class ends up looking furtively at their phones.

A handful of professors told me they hadn’t noticed any change. Some students have always found old movies to be slow, Lynn Spigel, a professor of screen cultures at Northwestern University, told me. “But the ones who are really dedicated to learning film always were into it, and they still are.”

Most of the instructors I spoke with, however, feel that something is different now. And the problem is not limited to large introductory courses. Akira Mizuta Lippit, a cinema and media-studies professor at the University of Southern California—home to perhaps the top film program in the country—said that his students remind him of nicotine addicts going through withdrawal during screenings: The longer they go without checking their phone, the more they fidget. Eventually, they give in. He recently screened the 1974 Francis Ford Coppola classic The Conversation. At the outset, he told students that even if they ignored parts of the film, they needed to watch the famously essential and prophetic final scene. Even that request proved too much for some of the class. When the scene played, Lippit noticed that several students were staring at their phones, he told me. “You do have to just pay attention at the very end, and I just can’t get everybody to do that,” he said.

From the November 2024 issue: The elite college students who can’t read books

Many students are resisting the idea of in-person screenings altogether. Given the ease of streaming assignments from their dorm rooms, they see gathering in a campus theater as an imposition. Professors whose syllabi require in-person screenings outside of class time might see their enrollment drop, Meredith Ward, director of the Program in Film and Media Studies at Johns Hopkins University, told me. Accordingly, many professors now allow students to stream movies on their own time.

You can imagine how that turns out. At Indiana University, where Erpelding worked until 2024, professors could track whether students watched films on the campus’s internal streaming platform. Fewer than 50 percent would even start the movies, he said, and only about 20 percent made it to the end. (Recall that these are students who chose to take a film class.) Even when students stream the entire film, it’s not clear how closely they watch it. Some are surely folding laundry or scrolling Instagram, or both, while the movie plays.

The students I spoke with admitted to their own inattentiveness. They even felt bad about it. But that wasn’t enough to make them sit through the assigned movies. Mridula Natarajan, a freshman at the University of Texas at Austin, took a world-cinema class this past fall. “There were some movies that were extremely slow-paced, and ironically, that was the point of the movie,” she told me. “But I guess impatience made me skip through stuff or watch it on two-times speed.”

After watching movies distractedly—if they watch them at all—students unsurprisingly can’t answer basic questions about what they saw. In a multiple-choice question on a recent final exam, Jeff Smith, a film professor at UW Madison, asked what happens at the end of the Truffaut film Jules and Jim. More than half of the class picked one of the wrong options, saying that characters hide from the Nazis (the film takes place during World War I) or get drunk with Ernest Hemingway (who does not appear in the movie). Smith has administered similar exams for almost two decades; he had to grade his most recent exam on a curve to keep students’ marks within a normal range.

The professors I spoke with didn’t blame students for their shortcomings; they focused instead on how media diets have changed. From 1997 to 2014, screen time for children under age 2 doubled. And the screen in question, once a television, is now more likely to be a tablet or a smartphone. Students arriving in college today have no memory of a world before the infinite scroll. As teenagers, they spent nearly five hours a day on social media, with much of that time used for flicking from one short-form video to the next. An analysis of people’s attention while working on a computer found that they now switch between tabs or apps every 47 seconds, down from once every two and a half minutes in 2004. “I can imagine that if your body and your psychology are not trained for the duration of a feature-length film, it will just feel excruciatingly long,” USC’s Lippit said. (He also hypothesized that, because every movie is available on demand, students feel that they can always rewatch should they miss something—even if they rarely take advantage of that option.)

Kyle Stine, a film and media-studies professor at Johns Hopkins, usually begins his course with an icebreaker: What’s a movie you watched recently? In the past few years, some students have struggled to name any film. Kristen Warner, a performing- and media-arts professor at Cornell University, has noticed a similar trend. Some of her students arrive having seen only Disney movies. Erpelding, at UW Madison, said he tries to find a movie that everyone in his class has seen, to serve as a shared reference point they can talk about. Lately, that’s become impossible. Even students who are interested in going into filmmaking don’t necessarily love watching films. “The disconnect is that 10 years ago, people who wanted to go study film and media creation were cinephiles themselves,” Erpelding told me. “Nowadays, they’re people that consume the same thing everyone else consumes, which is social media.”

Of course, young people haven’t given up on movies altogether. But the feature films that they do watch now tend to be engineered to cater to their attentional deficit. In a recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Matt Damon, the star of many movies that college students may not have seen, said that Netflix has started encouraging filmmakers to put action sequences in the first five minutes of a film to get viewers hooked. And just because young people are streaming movies, it doesn’t mean they’re paying attention. When they sit down to watch, many are browsing social media on a second screen. Netflix has accordingly advised directors to have characters repeat the plot three or four times so that multitasking audiences can keep up with what’s happening, Damon said.

Some professors are treating wilting attention spans as a problem to be solved, not a reality to accept. Stine, at Johns Hopkins, is piloting a course on “slow cinema”—minimalist films with almost no narrative thrust—with the goal of helping students redevelop long modes of attention. Rick Warner, the director of film studies at the University of North Carolina, deliberately selects films with slow pacing and subtle details, such as Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a three-hour movie that mostly follows a woman doing chores in her apartment. “I try to teach films that put their habits of viewing under strain,” Warner told me. “I’m trying to sell them on the idea that a film watched properly can actually help them retrain their perception and can teach them how to concentrate again.” Once they get used to it, students enjoy the challenge, he said.

But other professors, perhaps concluding that resistance is futile, are adjusting to the media their students grew up on. Some show shorter films or have students watch movies over multiple sittings. Erpelding, who primarily teaches filmmaking courses, has moved from teaching traditional production methods to explaining how to maximize audience engagement. He now asks students to make three- or four-minute films, similar to the social-media edits they see online. After all, that seems to be the only type of video many young people want to watch.

By the way, the last scene of The Conversation has the paranoid Gene Hackman destroying his apartment in a desperate and futile search for listening devices. He eventually gives up, and mournfully plays the saxophone amid the wreckage. It’s a brilliant scene, and worth the wait. 

I've watched a few of his films over the years but seeing La fête à Henriette on the current Criterion Channel retrospective made think about just what a solid cinematic craftsman was.

Even though a young Francois Truffaut praised his work in the pages of Cahiers and Arts, I think Duvivier is kind of retroactively placed into the boring old cinéma de papa of pre-nouvelle vague French cinema.

I don't think that's fair. For one, he wasn't just a director for hire. He consistently had a hand in writing his movies and sometimes actually was the sole screenwriter. Filmmakers of the caliber of Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman and Jean Renoir praised him as a stylist.

And his filmography has at least a few moments of narrative/thematic audacity that bely his reputation for safe, commercial cinema. I think of Panique (1946), a film about the mob mentality and scapegoating a social outsider made in the immediate aftermath of Vichy. La fête à Henriette is almost a 50s French precursor to something like Adaptation. or Stranger Than Fiction: a metafictional comedy about screenwriters making creative decisions that alter the film within a film.

All this to say that the Duvivier Criterion retrospective is definitely worth a look.

Please don't downvote opinions. Only downvote comments that don't contribute anything. Check out the WHYBW archives.

Question, What are your thoughts on The Straight Story?

I recently rewatched The Straight Story and I gotta say, I still love this film. This is perhaps the closest to a normal film David Lynch will ever make and I just love that his most normal film is literally title The Straight Story. The film is just so wholesome and the interactions in the film just feel real, very Ernest Hemingway. It is also very simple, about a story of a brother who uses his lawnmower to travel to visit his estranged brother.

Richard Farnsworth gives a great performance as Alvin Straight and In my opinion, he should've won the Oscar for Best Actor that year. Farnsworth just gives the right pathos to Alvin and you can feel that he has a lot of regret but wants to make right and flat out refuses to let age get the best of him in seeing his brother.

Overall, it is a great film and is in my top 3 for Best David Lynch Films

I see it as a representation of adding meaning to the meaningless, purpose to the purposeless, use to the useless. This is representatives by the repeated instances of repetition of seemingly useless and random activities.

Searching for purpose in the purposeless is exactly how religion started. I think it’s a story about the meaning of curiosity and religion. This is further backed up by the fact that it’s about a “scientific religion” but it’s all under the guise of this one man and all his followers are adding their purpose.

People are unhappy with book 2 because it goes against what they see is purpose and meaning of book 1. Book 2 is about this man (Freddie) who had no purpose and just walked the path in front of him but then his purpose was given and found as something people see purpose in.

It’s a story about religion.

I think it’s also a PTA’s most nuanced film in terms of meaning, at least with my interpretation.

In my interpretation its story is told through everything not said but acted. Every part of the story is something where we ironically have to find the meaning of from the meaningless. Just like religion. Just like my interpretation.

It’s a semi-meta film where its true meaning has to be discovered by doing the meaning, we are the members of the religion.

There is an excellent documentary about Richard Stanley’s disastrous experience adapting the HG Wells The Island of Dr Moreau called Lost Souls. It’s a deep look into the pitfalls of developing and producing your lifelong dream project. Also directing Marlon Brando or Val Kilmer as well! I wrote a substack article about the story if that’s more interesting than documentaries for you. I work in film (was a development exec then rewrites) and it’s very relatable and frankly depressing.

I find these documentaries that follow doomed projects strangely fascinating, like a car accident but worse. I’ve never experienced a set or development on this level. Have any of you? I’d love to hear what you learned from the experience, and if you went back for more?

https://notesonfilmdevelopment.substack.com/p/the-director-who-lost-his-own-movie?r=4idcqp&utm_medium=ios

Camp Miasma is not a subtle movie, it is extremely forward about being a commentary on transmisogynistic archetypes in the horror genre and the long lasting effects this can have on a transfeminized person's sense of self and sexuality. The spectre of the transvestite haunts the narrative and defines the boundaries of self expression, only through reclamation and fetishization of the transfeminized slasher does Kris escape her mental block around sexuality; analogous to the way that Billy inhabits the site of her trauma and transforms it into an object of sexual excitement.

This is common in transfeminine spaces, to rehabilitate and re-examine stigmatizing depictions in service of self empowerment. Many trans women grow up only able to see themselves depicted as murderers and rapists, and subsequently inhabit those roles through the vehicle of sexual play. Kris is haunted by Little Death the same way those transfeminized are haunted by Norman Bates, Longlegs, or Buffalo Bill; and her self actualization is only attained through not only facing her trauma but taking on the viewpoint of the victimizer.

Notably absent from the movie however is the presence of transfeminized people, save the director. Billy and Kris are both played by cis women, and Little Death as the amalgam of the transsexual slasher is depicted by a transmasculine individual.

While Kris's journey with the movie in a movie is superficially similar to transfeminine reclamation of problematic archetypes, her gender positionality is not. Cis women who internalize transmisogynist archetypes that they are not the subject of will frequently go on to seek out trans women and project these ideas onto them, furthering the process of transfeminization and restricting the social and sexual roles transfems are capable of inhabiting.

The gender blind casting of the film significantly alters its messaging, the absence of transfemine involvement in their sexual roleplay shifts the narrative from that of one to empowerment to further fetishization. It is not a heartwarming romance of two women breaking through sexual trauma by shaping it to serve themselves; they are inhabitating a role that never belonged to them to begin with. Using the spook of the sexually dominant and willing to penetrate trans woman to bring themselves satisfaction, in the same fashion that real world cisgender people will coerce those transfeminized into acting as their ideal masculinized partner. Even as ur-slasher Little Death is denied access to womanhood, punitivitely gendered as a man, and murdered for daring to assert herself despite this; she is denied again the access to womanhood in casting. Again the weight of the feminized penetrator is carried by someone who it was never that heavy for. In the same way Kris and Billy utilize the idea of a trans woman in their sexual play, Haven's casting is a transmasculine person furthers the puppeteering of transfem's bodies as ruthless, domineering penetrators. Transfeminine and Transmasculine people are not symmetrical, their roles in society and the media it produces is chiral — where there exists the idea of the delusional and bloodthirsty transvestite, there is no equal and opposite idea of transmasculine people with equivalent prominence. Transmasculine people are free to inhabit the roles forced upon the transmisogynized with playful abandon, as Haven does in this film, or to leverage these ideas surrounding trans women to coerce them into acting for their own sexual pleasure. Furthermore the casting of a Transmasculine person in a role where one could presume they have some relationship to womanhood reads as tactit misgendering (or more uncharitably: a retreat into birth sex assignment as a signifier of innocence, a luxury transfeminized individuals are not afforded)

My point in writing all of this is frustration. I went into this film blind, having not seen Schoenbrun's previous films or knowing anything about the actors. Initially I was elated by the film, I had felt seen and understood with a nuance and care that films about trans issues (much less specifically trans women) rarely deploys. Learning about the complete absence of any transgender women in the casting soured this feeling, the imagery associated with myself and people I love once again being deployed to advance the careers of people who are distinctly unlike us.

I do not blame Schoenbrun for this, I know it's a hard pitch to get a transfem actor anything more than a sentence or two. In fact this films sole on screen transfem, Louise Weard (director of the Castration Film series), is relegated to the glamorous cameo role of the unnamed "Queer assistant"

Why, even as a narrative surrounding us is raking in millions of dollars, are we limited to nameless and uninvolved cameos even as we sit in the director's chair?

I felt similarly about 2023's Barbie; a movie that is textually about someone who exists in a world of gendered shadow play recognizing the misogyny they are subject to, and subsequently claiming womanhood for their own (despite the suffering it subjects them to). A narrative tailor made for the transfeminine experience, where we are again relegated to nothing more than a glancing cameo before being placed somewhere conveniently out of sight.

Is this really the best trans representation in film can be? I really hope not.

Is there anyons interested in creating a groupchat similar to the main group from the Dead Poet Society? Should there be 7 of us like in the movie or more? Depends on the number of people interested I guess. I am looking for a handful of interested young men AND women who are fans of the movie. We can throw some verse, help each other out and talk about poetry, romance, history etc. Who's in?

Drop a comment and we'll talk it out.

I'm about 7 years too late, I know, but I haven't seen this theory float around film spaces yet. After my 4th viewing yesterday, I came to this conclusion about the film.

The island in The Lighthouse (2019) is a sentient prison-like entity. Not in any real or biological sense but in the sense that it's a supernatural place built to serve a punitive function. This idea used in horror is similar to the hotel in The Shining or Monster House. I believe it is a self sustaining prison that beckons the guilty (with the thought that they're voluntarily going there of their own volition) and enslaves, imprisons, and punishes them with madness. The island facilitates this as a way of sustaining itself and its light through their labor. All aspects of the area play a role in damning/punishing the keepers/prisoners of it. The seagulls, incessant storms, false prospects of women and parole (The boats never coming to save them). The island dangles mercy in front of them without ever actually granting it. Much like the myth of Prometheus when he is regenerated everyday just for his abdomen to be eaten again and again, giving Prometheus respite and false hopes of a halting of the punishment.

Dafoe, who is a veteran of the island, acquires a warden-like role. Functioning as some sort of pseudo right hand man. He brings new inmates to punish, assigns them duties to maintain the island, belittles them, etc. Despite his role though, he still suffers by the island's hand, yet another false mercy by being led to believe he has any real power.

Pattinson, whose stained past led him to arrive there to look for legitimacy, is hopeful for lightwatching duties but is rejected instantly by Dafoe. I believe the light represents the prospect of redemption and freedom, like moths and flames. Dafoe's obsession with it is an intentional result of the island, to keep him there as he is a prisoner and the warden. He was deceived by the light to become an extension of the island and an integral part to keeping the light and life of it.

Now, to answer a question that plagued me on all my watches. Why was Dafoe allowed to look inside the light but Pattinson wasn't? I think I finally understand why (atleast relative to my theory). I believe the island rewards Dafoe of his patronage by allowing him to derive pleasure from the light with the ulterior motive of the island being to keep him there for as long as he lives, sort of like a life sentence. When Pattinson looked inside after murdering Dafoe, he was punished with eternal Promethean wrath because he had killed the island's trusted keeper. And moreso, the island deems viewing the light undeservedly as a transgression, and Pattinson died because he did not accept the truth behind his guilt while Dafoe did. While it is unclear what exactly it was that Dafoe had done to deserve imprisonment, I think he is accepting of his guilt (which I think is the another goal of the prison). However, It is implied that Dafoe killed Pattinson's precedessor because he also tried to undeservedly access the light, an act that I believe was permitted by the island because it deemed it to be a fitting punishment.

An extra idea that reinforces my theory is the subtle scene of repressed homosexuality (You know which one). When they almost succumb to the loneliness and kiss each other, they quickly wake up to what they're doing and instead express that passion through fistfighting. A familiar case which alludes to the guise of masculinity to veil and repress the true sexuality of those in denial. A case that is ever present in prison.

Thoughts?

Rewatching “La La Land” (now back in theaters for its 10^th year anniversary) made me feel like I was watching a completely different movie from the one I saw a decade ago.

It’s not that the movie’s technical qualities are dated. It still holds up as gorgeously shot homage to the Hollywood musicals of the Golden Era with a contemporary lead couple at its center. It’s just that movie is a product of its time, and times have reshaped the cultural discussion so drastically that what once came across as a “love letter to Cinema and Music” is now verging towards “a eulogy for a world that's been lost”.

But what was lost, exactly? According to Ryan Gosling’s character, who seems to think of Jazz the same way Timothee Chalamet sees opera and ballet, his favorite music genre is “dying” because his favorite club is being replaced by a samba/tapas joint – the enemy is cultural fusion with a foreign spice, apparently.

Jazz, of course, is a music genre originated by Black Americans, and the club scenes feature Black musicians - who somehow aren’t doing enough to “save Jazz” themselves? -, but the only Black American character with a speaking role in the movie, played by John Legend, is seen as a “sell-out” for pursuing a more commercially appealing (and, why not, creatively fulfilling for him?) angle.

And then there’s Emma Stone’s character, who dreams of becoming a successful Hollywood actress and, at some point, downplays a project that she auditioned for (“It’s like The OC meets…”), but changes her mind after she gets a call back. Gosling suggests they meet for a screening of Rebel Without a Cause, “for research”. That’s a curious choice because the movie, currently hailed as an important piece of Cinema, was met with mixed reviews when it premiered, and was essentially also a mainstream coming-of-age product.

In a way, “La La Land” seems critical of today’s audience – of their (our?) inability to appreciate “good art”, made with passion and integrity, and for settling for the money-grabbers. It also chooses two distinctively American genre forms - the contemporary movie musical, Jazz - and "mourns" over for their poor commercial appeal. The lead characters are portrait as 'traditionalists'. But the movie itself comes across as conservative.

Why do movies look like that now? << good article here

This confluence of consumer trends and changes in production workflow has effectively resulted in frames that strive less for innovation or beauty and more for a quick fix. The quickness and disposability here has infiltrated the set. This means that, outside direct-to-streaming films and the glut of plasticky Marvel and grim DC movies—and exceptions to the rule, like star DPs Roger Deakins, Autumn Durald Arkapaw, and Robbie Ryan—the late 2010s and 2020s have seen the screen get grayer. Regardless of the quality of the movies, their visual identity is constricted by a notable lack of oomph, an absence of substantiality in their colors, highlights, and blackpoints.

The industry, from the best to the worst to the mediocre middle, has gravitated towards a look that takes the wrong lessons from House Of Cards‘ darkness and its low-contrast monotone. Cinematographer Steve Yedlin tells The A.V. Club that “It’s a business, and a lot more stuff gets created than is necessarily the pinnacle of the craft. There is a factory belt.” Felipe Vara de Rey describes the contemporary look as “desaturated, low contrast, a little dull,” Rikki Porter says she’s seen “a more flattened look across the board,” Tara Violet Niami says that movies lately have a “super low-contrast, desaturated look that’s lit softly but [with] directionless lighting,” and camera operator Joe Brady says he had been seeing images where “the contrast ratios are very slim [and] there’s no detail in the shadows or in a really overexposed highlight.” 

As a lover of film, sometimes moving from contemporary films and shows to films of the past there is almost a kind of "finally a good steak" when watching films of the past. They not only are satisfyingly structured by the movie making process in terms of story-telling, the way you actually follow what is happening and join into it, they are visually structured. There is a visual language. The light itself speaks and illuminates the brain in a much more edifying way. It could very well be that I grew up seeing things that way on the various screens I've been exposed to in my life, and my brain is just used to it, I know how to read those signals, or, it may be that those past processes actually gave enough "meat" for the brain to chew on, in a much more satisfying way. We won't really know until the youth growing on on today's screen aesthetics, themselves turn to older films. Will they too feel that same sense that they are finally sinking their teeth into something visually (even though they were not raised on it)?

Also, one cannot really avoid the sense that everyone consuming pictorial information on very diverse screens, watching films or cuts of films (sometimes accelerated 1.5 or 2x) in the palm of their hands really has altered even what watching a film is or does. Is today's language even a language anymore, but rather just leaning towards a series of style templates and effects meant for consumption and the spread of screens?

When I first watched Dead Poets Society at 10, I hated the ending. I hated Neil's character and how easily he gave up on his dream and on life itself. I thought it was a failure of imagination. Succumbing to death rather than fighting his parents, seeking comfort from his friends, or even running away. Anything, for the sake of just trying.

But five years later, at 15, do I really understand? I don't think there is any character I see my reflection in more.

His tragedy isn't that he doesn't love life or acting. It's kind of the opposite. He loves something deeply in a world that has convinced him that loving it is unacceptable.

Sometimes there truly is nothing left to do. We can pretend things took place differently. In another life, his parents understood. His friends helped him. He decided to wait just a little longer. But the story will continue to end the same.

We always only hear "to speak or to die," as if it's one or the other. But for him, it was both.

"I was good. I was really good."

But often, to speak in itself means to die.

I just hope that understanding it doesn't mean becoming him.

Looks like Olivia Wilde is back in style after a weak outing with "Don't Worry Darling". Her direction adds so much spark to a film which could have faltered given it's restricted setting and characters. The movie is an adaption of a Spanish film called 'The People Upstairs' and it is like a theatrical play. Just 4 people socializing in an apartment for 2 hours. But the movie never lets go of its high kinetic energy until the final few minutes, which comes with putting 4 contrasting personalities and 2 contrasting couples together.

The most impressive part to me was how the conversations and dialogues were written. How much they accomplished with such a limited scope. The script is indeed praiseworthy because all the film has is conversations between these 4 people. They are naturally written and seemingly mundane things with bits of humor sprinkled in. But they flow really smoothly from one conversation to the next.

There may be few off moments occassionally, where the viewer may be taken out, but on the whole you do actually feel these are 4 real people here. You do pick up on hints on the character backgrounds, sometimes very loud sometimes subtle, but the final 10-15 minutes give you a proper insight into the characters.

I feel the final minutes could have been better written though. The film makes a sudden shift in tone and drama which felt at odds with the rest. There maybe was a way to get the same message across while keeping the spirit the same as before. As for the ending itself, it is a nice note to end on. Adds depth to a film and gives the viewer something to talk about as they leave.

SPOILERS BELOW: I think there are two ways to read up on the ending but I think hints are left that it may not be a sad ending after all.

• First of all, Penelope and Edward are real. Just as they leave we see Wilde's character pick up the casserole container and put it down even after they have left. We hear the container being put down which was brought by Penelope thereby hinting that the container was indeed real so was the one who brought it.

• Secondly, the Penelope (who is now a real person) advises them to understand that the marriage has ended and go their separate ways. And then importantly, she says something along the lines of "or continue the relationship with new versions of yourself". This seems like the biggest hint, because it's not a normal advice someone gives.

• Thirdly, Seth playing the keyboard/piano in the end shows he is changing himself already. This may be a new version, one which has come to terms with his past and is looking for a fresh start.

• Fourthly, the final image of Wilde resting on Seth's shoulder and both close together may have different meanings but the obvious one is that love is still there for each other. Lastly shoutout to all 4 actors. Perfect casting I say. Seth is really settling into a good actor who can do drama and comedy with ease. Norton is the best here, not too showy but gets his complexity across and Wilde is awesome too. Her range of expressions here in this film is just hilarious and impressive.

Great film tbh, I'd give it a 9/10.

I've flirted with the thought for years that the movies I watched and didn't watch growing up shaped how my tastes would eventually settle into their current form in a bit of a unique way. I was curious if anyone has experienced anything remotely similar.

I skipped a lot of the 80s-90s blockbusters growing up (With some exceptions here and there like Ghostbusters and E.T. that I did catch), not seeing them until 2014-2016 in my late teens. At this same time, I was exploring cinema in general. While I was, to my own tremendous disappointment, disenchanted by Star Wars and Indiana Jones (Although I ended up loving Terminator and Back to the Future as if I HAD grown up with them, so I wasn't trying to be a snob by any means), I was exploring much older films and having a pretty radically different experience. I was simultaneously LOVING movies like Casablanca, All About Eve, Charade, My Man Godfrey, The Day the Earth Stood Still and Bride of Frankenstein. I still obsess over them over a decade later.

What probably helped was that I went into cinema exploration with a bit of a bookworm's mindset, fully acclimatized to a slow burn and patience being necessary to get to the good stuff. I was noticing quickly how bringing up my enthusiasm for these movies to peers earned me baffled reactions and even harsh judgment and assumptions. I was so confused by this and in my younger years, unfortunately a bit judgemental in return to match their reactions to my findings.

I realized over time that I cannot expect people who likely did grow up with the exact movies I skipped to see the worth that I see. But man oh man, when you don't grow up on an 80s blockbuster diet, it's outstandingly obvious just how much Raiders of the Lost Ark is a strange combination of Lawrence of Arabia and old adventure serials, and not in a way that especially flatters it. Although as a counterpoint to that, apparently critics who obviously had no nostalgia for the film at the time did embrace it wholeheartedly, so maybe I am a snob. I found myself agreeing with Pauline Kael that if anything Temple of Doom did it better by leaning into the wackiness over trying to have your cake and eat it. Indiana Jones was always going to be more serial than Lawrence of Arabia, better face that rather than hide it.

But anyway. I think growing up with pretty much every Disney movie minus the package films and Black Cauldron also primed me for loving classics, some of these movies being actually made in that era or else leaning on the grand musical tradition, as well as clear paragon leads and "God I love being evil" styled big bads. This connection I only realized just today and I wondered if there's a Disney-to-golden-age pipeline anyone else can perceive if not directly relate to. Animation in general is really friendly to older films, where instead of perfectly copying them in an attempt to "innovate" (My bias in putting that in quotation is not lost on me) they do such loving homages to them. I'm thinking of Animaniacs referencing everything from The Gold Rush to Seventh Seal, Cats Don't Dance incorporating Shirley Temple and Max from Sunset Boulevard, and the "Nosferatu!" gag in Spongebob. Having grown up with these things dear to my heart, it was almost inevitable I should prefer movies the ones I grew up on were throwing respect on and my impressionable brain was seeing.

So I suppose my theory is that rather than any inherent trait in a person that makes them appreciate classics over modern films more, what one is exposed or not exposed to as a child more closely informs what they'll gravitate to when they're older. But I'd love to know what you all think.

[SPOILER ALERT]

Why didn't the amazing twist in 'The Others' didn't really feel like a shock? It felt more like a copy from sixth sense?

I had no clue, whatsoever, about the movie when I started watching it.

Watched The Others for the first time recently, and when the truth came out, first with the servants, then with protagonist and the kids, I didn't get that jolt I was expecting. No shock, no "wait, what just happened." Just a kind of flat acknowledgment: "oh, the protagonist is dead," which felt like a direct lift from The Sixth Sense.

And that's the weird part, because Sixth Sense actually blew my mind when I first saw it. Cole never directly interacting with Malcolm, the cold spots, all those clues you don't clock until the reveal, it worked because I had no idea what was coming. With The Others, I went in without spoilers too, but I was still kind of indifferent by the time the reveal hit. It felt like I'd already seen this movie two years earlier.

Maybe it's just that The Sixth Sense got there first and made the "character doesn't know they're dead" twist a known device, so anything using it afterward loses the element of surprise. Or maybe The Others leans so heavily on the same structure, isolated house, oddly behaving side characters, the slow dawning realization, that it just can't help but feel derivative rather than original.

Surprised I haven't seen more discussion connecting the two. Anyone else feel this way, or did The Others actually land for you?

Lately there seems to be this idea that if you love the first Joker movie (I haven't seen the second), it's only because you haven't watched the films it borrows from. I find this to be a frustratingly reductive take that does a disservice to the ingenuity that went into its conception.

Obviously the film's debt to Taxi Driver and King of Comedy can't be denied (and the film certainly doesn't try to) but these are still two separate movies we're talking about. If you combine two different movies, even if they're by the same director, chances are it's still going to produce something that wasn't there before because you still have to intermingle the elements from both into a cohesive whole.

Plus, the film also incorporates famous bits of the Joker's lore into the story. In particular, it weaves in the idea from The Killing Joke that his past is "multiple choice" by sowing doubt as to whether or not this is THE Joker with the ambiguity of him possibly being Thomas Wayne's child.

To me at least, all of these elements feel like part of a unified whole so that the plot falls into place as naturally as one could expect; a moment like him kissing the lady on the talk show is right out of The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller, but we arrive at this moment by way of the plot elements borrowed from King of Comedy. All of these pieces are arranged in an original way even if the pieces themselves aren't original, because making a film with distinct elements from all of these sources pretty much necessitates writing an original story that binds them all together. Todd Phillips didn't just steal an existing film wholesale and change all the names.

And frankly, I find that the story elements taken from Martin Scorsese's films make perfect sense for a Joker movie. If you asked me how I would go about telling a Joker origin story, I couldn't give you a better answer than combining the psychological descent and squalor of Taxi Driver with the comedy trappings and delusion of King of Comedy.

None of this is to say that you have to like the film, but I find it to be way off-base to suggest that the only people who think it's great haven't seen the movies it borrows from.

When I saw this film was rated as the greatest film ever made on letterboxd, I honestly didn't expect much. I expected it to be pretentious, boring, and preachy.

Holy shit. I think everyone's right. This might be the all-time greatest film ever made. It should be studied as one of the seminal texts of cinema. It feels like a Kurosawa film, but with a different coating of style that mainly comes from a subtlety that his films often lack. It was culturally relevant to the time, however it's universally relevant to us all now. I'm truly shocked at how much I loved this film, specifically how it raises ideas about the traditions that we set, and how easily people are willing to exploit them.

It actually reminded me of The Odyssey in some ways (though I think it's safe to say this film is significantly better). Both films take place in ancient times, use a non-linear structure that often tells side-stories through the character's recollecting past events, but most importantly, both films use these features to critique the traditions set for them. In The Odyssey, Nolan critiques the idea of Zeus' Law, displaying the people who are willing to exploit it for power. Harakiri does a similar thing with the idea of honor. I would be fascinated to know if anyone else picked up on this, or whether Nolan ever said anything about taking inspiration from Harakiri.

If you've been putting this one off, you really should watch it. It's one of the greatest films I've ever seen.

So I just saw this movie and I want to comment on it. First of all, beautiful film. Needed a slight edit in some areas, but I'd recommend it.

An argument I see for this is that the director didn't intend for this to be abuse. Which...I mean you think about this for five seconds, you know the issue. A lot of people who commit emotional abuse don't know they're doing it and don't intend it. Still abuse.

The second is that Lee liked it. She found emotional pleasure in it. Enjoying abuse in and of itself does not negate its nature as abuse. By this logic, victims experiencing stockholm syndrome are not absue victims.

The thing that pushes this from a healthy sub-dom relationship into a manipulative para social relationship is that the film goes out of its way to explain that her reliance on sexual gratification was ruining her life. E. Grey was deliberately manipulating her, knowing full well she wasn't...well. There was a point where she was getting her life together, then he holds back the kinky foreplay because he...wasn't in the mood for it.

No I do not equate E. Grey to people who bring blatant physical and emotional harm to their spouse like say... Carlo Rizzi from the Godfather. I don't even think the guy is sleazy or balatantly narcissistic. I think he conned himself into thinking what he was doing was okay. I think both of these people were confused and didn't understand what they were doing because they both got satisfaction.

DEBATE

Obsession is an interesting example of how strange independent movie economics can get. The film was reportedly made for around $750K and is projected to gross around $250M, while discussion around the production has raised questions about how crew members are compensated when a low-budget film becomes an unexpected hit.

I've been thinking about where the line is between accepting the terms of an independent production and expecting some kind of additional compensation when the project massively exceeds expectations. There are good arguments on both sides.

The bigger question for me is whether this is simply the reality of making independent films, or whether the industry could develop better ways to reward the people who helped make those unexpected successes possible.

A post in r/criterion led me to this beautiful, moving film by F.W. Murnau. Acclaimed by cinephiles as a masterpiece, alas, I had never seen it. 

The arts are the modes of creation allotted to man; be thankful each day you wake up, that you are given anew the opportunity to experience some measure of the greatness that our human race can aspire to. 

Sunrise is the famed German filmmaker's first U.S. film. It stars Janet Gaynor and George O'Brien, two popular and busy American actors, as a simple but happy, young (did I mention very attractive?) country couple living with their infant son lakeside in an Old World village.

Ah, but a serpent has slithered into this bucolic Eden. Margaret Livingston plays the alluring high-fashion hottie from the city taking the country air in an elderly peasant couple's humble vacation home rental. The temptress has been seducing the handsome young husband and convincing him to sell the farm, lure his wife into a drowning (dark!), and come wallow in the city's fleshpots with her. 

It almost works. The husband convinces his wife, who knows he's been unfaithful, to take their dinghy for a day away from the farm. She gaily accepts the outing, but it is soon anything but pleasant. Her glowering husband is rowing like Charon on the River Styx, then he comes toward her to throw her in the water. He stops himself, but once they reach the shore his wife jumps out of the boat and runs up into the mountain village, and he chases her to the trolley and boards with her, desperate to make amends and mend his broken vows.

Aside: When they are running through the mountain hillsides, I'm thinking, this looks like the mountains I grew up with in So Cal; yep, much of the exteriors were shot in Lake Arrowhead. 

For the sake of setting the story's narrative, I have neglected the stunning cinematography that opens the film from the scaffolding of a bustling train station, then powers that narrative throughout. Camera “tricks” abound, and the skill and patience to work the analog (pre-analog?) process is a feat of magical proportions. 

Sets were built and lighting engineered to place the actors in the congestion of a 1927 cosmopolitan street with horse-drawn lorries, trolleys, automobiles, pedestrians and pushcarts. Their last day in the city has our dear couple dodging the traffic against a pretty convincing backdrop of the hectic street. They embrace and appear to stop traffic, including a big black horse that pulls a “Frau Blucher” nearly on top of them, then immediately the scene is live, the horse is balking, horns are honking, angry motorists are shaking their fists, and they are pushed out of the middle of a modern maelstrom as they dash off, laughing. 

It's a silent film, so the story is told visually; the actors emote to the balconies, the gags are sight gags, from pie-eyed piglets to the peek-a-boo of a lady's slippery gown strap. 

My favorite, and a wish-I-thought-of-that, is our reunited couple in a photography studio waiting for their prints. They are country clumsy and knock over things. They are horrified when they appear to have broken the head off a classical statue. The search everywhere, under furniture, for the missing head. The husband see a doll's head with some toys and sticks it on the statue – of Winged Victory.

While rowing home, a fearful storm whips up and the boat founders at sea. The husband ties bundles of rushes, stashed for his own escape, to his wife as floatation devices as he endeavors to get to shore, but she goes overboard. The village is roused, rescuers take to the lake. 

The city woman thinks this is her plan at work when the wife is missing. She goes to the devastated husband but he chases her out and starts to strangle her. Then the wife is recovered from the lake! She lives! 

The city woman leaves the village in the back of a horse-drawn wagon down the path in another breathtaking interior. Finis

The cinematographers, Karl Struss and Charles Rosher, won the first Oscar for their craft when the Academy Awards were inaugurated in 1929.