crumbsroom wrote:

A decent article on some of Flower Moons controversies


https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/the-current-debate-killers-of-the-flower-moon-and-the-pain-of-perspective?fbclid=IwAR0Lam8SwOonbXVIN8IE4N2jpRegt4NC0dXfWVQABpCwFSYPw8dwDIadRk8

"Siding" is such a foolish way of looking at things.  Some people only see sides. 

"How long will you be complacent with racism? How long will you go along with something and not say something, not speak up, how long will you be complacent?...This is an opportunity for them to ask themselves this question of morality." 

Obviously, I have to take issue with the kinds of criticisms that see the perspective depiction as de facto endorsement: "a white director taking it on brings with it deserved charges of exploitation"; does it?  How exactly?  "You want less rooting through the vile actions of these white folks — which only serves them, even as villains"; serves them how?  "Not enough space is provided to restoring palpable personhood to people so relentlessly robbed of it"; there's perhaps some negotiating how much is "enough" or what constitutes "palpable", but I didn't feel that such characters as Mollie, her mother or her sisters, especially Anna and Rita, or her husband Henry, were less than fully defined characters.  If anything, I've seen it noted, the various white thugs of King's clan were more anonymous.  "The movie seems curiously reluctant to penetrate the psychology of its Osage characters"; I can only disagree.  All of this smacks of zero-sum screen time.  And then there were a couple of tweets linked in the Soraya Roberts piece: "Trying so hard to excuse humanize and excuse the villain and abuser..."; "The White Savior story"; well, I just don't believe either of these people bothered to watch the film.

The Soraya Roberts piece is worth reading in full, as it has some of the best points to make here: "Specifically, it’s a film about a country’s colonialist, exploitative, violent, destructive, patriarchal subjugation of the world. This is a story of white America, as Scorsese has always been eager to tell. And just as Scorsese could not tell the Osage story, the Osage couldn’t quite tell this one."

But her thoughts on the knee-jerk moralizing is worth considering deeper: "there seems to be a collective inability in our culture to sit in silence without saying something reflexively, particularly when that silence is pregnant with the kind of contradiction art is meant to produce."

Soraya Roberts wrote:

It’s hard to parse where this need for prescriptive morality comes from, particularly since prescription is the opposite of art’s intention. Art is intended to provoke questions, not provide answers. This new requirement for clear direction seems to have emerged not just from a culture which is in a constant panic over the prospect of being canceled—no matter how nebulous that threat is—but is also of a piece with the less abstract, more technical processing of art you find in fandom circles. These are places where explicit parameters must be set forth within which the audience then feels permitted to operate. This is an audience that needs rules, or else it doesn’t know how to react.

We are no longer left to wonder about anything, nor are the characters. We are instead served the correct position on a platter. Don’t worry, we are told, you will know what’s right, because we will tell you. It’s as though the culture has designed a way to preemptively stave off being problematic by giving the answers first.

I wouldn't callt this trend "moralist" because it isn't the insertion of morality into the criticism that's a problem in itself but rather the flat, shallow, rigid, mercilessness of the application of morality that makes it so appalling.  And, btw, I personally have no idea why Flower Moon lacks morality, or any of Scorsese's other films for that matter, simply because they depict immoral people and acts.  Roberts quotes Scorsese at the end: "There was some decency there.  But for whatever reasons, the weakness of character is interesting to me. And so he’s weak, and he’s dangerous, but there’s still love there. And that’s kind of disturbing but, at the same time, it’s human. It’s what we are."

You can't be woke without empathy, and 'shoe-on-the-other-foot' justice is simply hypocrisy.

 

Sometimes it's hard to compete with online content these days, and, while still relatively rare in context of sheer volume, it draws a contrast between this kind of official documentary, given the prestige of festivals and critical review, and those less official Youtube labors of love which sometimes happen to superior.  For example, this documentary, as interesting it is as a complilation of ideas and themes, and as a montage of recontextualized footage, is not as revelatory as the 'Twin Perfect' exegesis of Twin Peaks.  But obviously, such examples of original internet video critiques are not the norm or even the standard, so it's hard to hold these unicorn aberrations against the more official product.

Lynch/Oz is fun, and completely fascinating for fans.  Roughly examining Lynch's influence and inspiration from The Wizard of Oz and his indulgence of dream-states, psychological dopplegangers and the artifice of escapism, it taps into meaty and deep subjects, and some of the compiled 'hosts' - John Waters, Rodney Ascher, Karyn Kusama - are more intriguing and insightful than others - David Lowrey, humblebragging about not having a color TV until 1989.  Ultimately, it's a celebration of the imagination and myth-making,

8/10
 

Hot take: I now love the ending to Paul Schrader's Hardcore.

Peter Boyle: "Forget it, Jack, it's the Fuck Dungeon."  (*roll credits*)

Jinnistan wrote:

Rock wrote:

Hot take: I now love the ending to Paul Schrader's Hardcore.

I guess one could call it messy.  I think I would have preferred *spoiler* if his daughter had rejected him

SPOILERS. (Although I think all of us have seen it)

Tbh that’s probably more likely given what she would be going back to, but at the same time I can’t imagine her actually sticking around even if she went back. I don’t think we have enough info about this character to judge what would have been more likely.

In any case, I think the final encounter is better than the original ending Schrader had in mind where it turned out she had already died in a car accident. This movie is about confronting each others values and worldviews, withholding that at the end would be a miscalculation.

Also I just like Scott punching out the bad guy. I’m a simple man with simple tastes.

Rock wrote:

I’m a simple man with simple tastes.

(*Philip Baker Hall in Boogie Nights gif*)

Rock wrote:

Also I haven’t gotten to the new Fincher yet, but he’s someone whose work I find technically exacting but frequently glib and self satisfied. The fact that he comes like a smug asshole in interviews doesn’t endear me to him either. I think Zodiac and Alien 3 are probably the only ones I actually like, as the material constrains the smugness.

It's a little ironic, because I prefer him when he's being less pretentious and just embracing his skill as a technocrat, B-movie servicible hackwork.  I like his stuff on a very basic level.  I would agree that Zodiac excels, and I find Game, Se7en, Fight Club to be dumb fun.  Arguably, I guess, Killer would fall into this category.  But, kinda like Nolan (even though I prefer N), I have to admit that much of my aversion to Fincher is as a response to the unwarranted fan-cult that he's managed to inspire.  I couldn't avoid seeing Killer in that lens, with all of the nihilist pseudo-philosophy and edgelord anti-empathy, that it's aimed at all of those little broken-hearted bitch-boys who misunderstood Tyler Durden.  Only Killer doesn't even attempt the satirical distance to offer a 'get-out-of-grimdark' card or any kind of layer to be misunderstood.  In that way, I think that after all of Fincher's more ambitious and inflated failures (Benjamin Button, Social Network, Gone Girl, Mank) that this might be the film where he finally exposes himself as that arrested adolescent that we all knew he was all along.  But no.  He keeps fooling most of the people most of the time.

Rock wrote:

I think I’m less put off by Nolan’s fan base because he seems to have an equally hyperbolic set of critics who consider him an Uwe Boll level filmmaker. I don’t think the anti Fincher crowd is nearly as over the top.

It's these kinds of extremities that makes up much of online exerted opinion so ... excerable?  (They'll come for the alliteratives eventually...)

When in fact both Nolan and Fincher are ultra-competent middle-brow professionals.  Neither genius nor jelly.

lol

I’ve seen exactly one Tubi original, and it was a movie that played TIFF and failed to find any other distribution deal from what I’m aware. Donald Shebib’s Nighttalk. No, you shouldn’t seek it out.

Radical Wolfe

There's this new Tom Wolfe documentary on Netflix which falls into the lazy, typical trap of rock star hagiography.  Lots of glamour pics of Wolfe's famous white linen suits, lots of focus on his "dandy" persona, and only eventually gets around to the point that such things were a distancing mechanism by who was essentially a solitary writer.  The doc is perversely based on a Vanity Fair article, and the doc is appropriately glib and superficial as expected from a fashion article, which isn't even to mention Wolfe's own disdain for that publication.  The doc works as an adequete introduction for those unaware of a leading light of what was probably the last great generation of American writers, and if it inspires people to dig deeper than I suppose it did its job.  Otherwise, it's about as insightful as an infomercial.

6/10
 

More disaster exploitation garbage that is disingenuously pretending to be social commentary, where every poorly written character is hyperbolically dim, shrill and incompetent.  It's definitely for audiences who may have found the humor in White Noise to be too sophisticated, but it still manages a couple of unintentional howlers, like that scene where Julia Roberts becomes a 'scaredeer'.  #partoftheproblem

2/10