Rock wrote:

Expensive Tastes

Goddamn, man.

Don't know why it took me so long to get around to this one.  As a fellow Jinn you'd imagine it would be right up my alley.  Maybe it was the lukewarm reviews or the otherwise lack of availability.  Anyway, regarding the former, as I've maintained, critics can be be pretty dumb.

Given the amount of CGI in the film, it's tempting to fear that George Miller, in his post-Fury Road success, would follow down the path of the post-success indulgencies of others like Peter Jackson, Sam Raimi or Guillermo del Toro, but unlike those others Miller has found an actual story to tell to which to hang all of his visual splendor.  That story, A.S. Byatt's "Djinn in a Nightingale's Eye", is really more in the spirit of Scheherazade (telegraphed in a brief billboard near the beginning of the film), an anthology of morality tales of love and folly as told by resident Djinn Idris Elba.  Most importantly, Miller understands myth as a resource of emotional and aesthetic symbolism.  In an unfair comparison, del Toro's Shape of Water confuses myth with genre, and unfortunately our pop culture-obsessed critics lapped that up.  One of the most hollow elements of so many of the faux-mythic films of this century, from 300 to all of the superhero installments, is their complete lack of understanding of the potential for subversive revelation in myth.  (The fact that Water won Best Picture while Longing was entirely ignored should be an embarrassment to the institution.)  Sure this film looks tremendous, even with all of its digital detritus, but none of that would matter if its story had no resonance.  And some may dismiss this as the fantasy romance that it certainly is, they will most likely end up missing its more subversive allure.

And as a Jinn, I won't deny that even given my preexisting interest in the material, both 1001 Nights and Near East history generally, that I was stunned to discover a more specific personal resonance to this film that I couldn't possibly publicly divulge and I doubt you'd believe me anyway.

9/10
 

Rock wrote:

Nothing to Hide
A Bridge Too Far
Tora! Tora! Tora!
Expensive Tastes
The Cassandra Crossing
Cleopatra
Little Girls Blue

You've watched Tora Tora Tora twice!!

And you've managed to pull yourself out of that coma?

Rock wrote:

I completely forgot about that movie after it came out.

I think after it bombed at the box office everyone forgot about it.

I really hate how many of the film's negative reviews seem contemptuous about the interracial romance.  Even the so-called progressive takes, like this one from Slate, where the critic is at least self-aware enough to note her own personal issues upfront:

A bigger problem with Three Thousand Years of Longing, and one I may not be equipped to explore fully as a white female critic, is the exoticization of the genie character as played by Elba. Is he a “Magical Negro,” ... a fantasy of the racial other as an idealized, self-sacrificing savior to the troubled white heroine?

1) Genies are already exoticized.
2) Like the discussion around Cleopatra, we're talking about a medieval historical context where "white" and "black" people had no meaning whatsoever.
3) This critic admits to not liking the third act, but *spoiler*
    
Such a strange counter-woke reaction to this type of diversity.

Casting a Black British actor in a role that would seem more suited to someone of Arab or Middle Eastern descent, and having him speak in an invented R-rolling accent of indeterminate origin, are choices that work to undercut whatever gesture toward representation Miller was trying to make by writing his central couple as a Black man and a white woman.

I don't believe that George Miller, or author A.S. Byatt, expressly were trying to centralize the racial dynamic of the couple.  (Genies aren't exactly an ethnicity.)  Even the critic mentions that this relationship is portrayed "not in explicitly racial terms", and maybe that should be telling.  I think this critic is trying to project her own idealized racial dynamic where it's not intended.

But for the most part, Three Thousand Years of Longing reads not as an unintended allegory of contemporary race relations [um, no shit, and why would it be?] but as a thoughtful, melancholy, and sometimes mordantly funny celebration of the time-and-space-collapsing power of storytelling.

So taking the latter as the more apt reading, which it is, the it kind of completely negates the lame attempt to criticize it based on the former, doesn't it?  Don't let that stop your attempt anyway, but I'm glad you had some glimmer of realization while typing that last sentence.  Too bad you only used the former point in the headline.

Or more contemptuously, we have Armond White, who sees this as a "globalist, anti-race, anti-white love story about equity and shame".  Not quite!  But everyone has an opportunity to roll out their personal luggage here.  Never mind the ying/yang of the leads' contrast of complexions, or how such contrasts exist throughout Eastern and West Asian art for aesthetic, rather than racial, purpose.  Our current culture wars have driven so many people crazy.  Myths are not the same as memes, and currently we are mythically malnourished.

I also rewatched Pasolini's Decameron on Prime this week.  Great film, but I should point out that its medieval author, Giovanni Boccaccio, is also the author what I still think is one of world masterpieces on understanding myth, Genealogia Deorum Gentilium, and despite the name it goes out of its way to avoid any explicitly religious confusion.

I would agree that Nicholson gives the better performance in The Missouri Breaks. But I have to be honest and say I don’t particularly like a lot of Jack’s “bigger” performances. He’s justifiably lauded for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but I miss the quieter work of those earlier years.

There also seems to be the incompatible ideas often floated around that white productions need to be more diverse, but also that white productions have no right to be telling the stories of these 'others'.

It's an impossible stance, either deliberately or out of stupidity (probably a bit of both).

This is why it might be a better notion for us to consider each instance of this kind of thing on its own. You know, not be on fucking autopilot with the opinions we form.

One of the most insulting things about these people are is how they have the unlimited energy to meticulously file through every element of a film looking for something that could possibly offend, if looked at in a very particular kind of light...and yet are beyond lazy when it comes to actually wrestling with the actual context of any of these elements. They stop cold when they feel anything resembling offence. Because that is all they actually care about. And the actual importance of furthering their cause gets treated as something almost secondary.

Fraudulent showboating fucks.

Intellectual cowards.

 

Rock wrote:

I would agree that Nicholson gives the better performance in The Missouri Breaks. But I have to be honest and say I don’t particularly like a lot of Jack’s “bigger” performances. He’s justifiably lauded for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but I miss the quieter work of those earlier years.

The stretch from 1970-1976 is Nicholson's greatest, and some of the "big" performances (Last Detail - "you're going to have a fucking beer!") I adore.  Generally I don't think Nicholson gets credit for his dynamism.  Five Easy Pieces is a good example of balancing quieter scenes with explosive ones.  I like that simmering razor energy.  And he wouldn't quite fall into self-parody until, maybe, Goin' South, although I still think it's pretty funny.  Witches of Eastwick, gold medal caliber self-parody.  Mars Attacks.  Come to think of it, I really like Jack's self-parody a lot, especially compared with his peers' self-parody of the same time.  But he did lose something when he lost the ability to pull out that soft soothing high-pitch reedy voice from the 70s.

Brando in Tango isn't so much self-parody (although sure it is), but my issue with it is that he goes so far out of his way to be unattractive, his charm is smarmy and selfish and he has a knack for souring any sensuality in the air even when he isn't being outright belligerant, that it's very difficult to buy into his allure.  Stanley Kowalski was also obnoxious and a pig but at least had a powerful magnetism.  It seems that Brando deliberately wanted to subvert that here, and that's fine and all, but for a film about sex it's frustrating that he's stubbornly so unsexy.  Between him and Jean-Pierre Leaud's clueless buffoon, I just feel really sorry for Maria's luck and/or taste in men.

Rock wrote:

Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama

Thanks for the spoiler warning, Rock.  Could have been treacherous.

Heart of Midnight
Chop Stix
Murphy's Law
Blackberry
Exterminator 2
 

I didn't stick a rating on my review but I think I landed around where you did. I've been chewing over it some more and I do think the movie is especially interesting in refusing characterization as an obvious endorsement of or critique of capitalism, at least the concept as it is discussed these days. I understand Baruchel was a huge fan of the product and I do think it's interesting that the movie argues that building an innately superior product is what made the company initially succeed rather than the short-sighted pursuit of market trends. And I also think it's interesting how Balsillie's ambitions seem to exist almost outside of market forces and in fact steer him to try and bend the market's will to align with him. Again, you could probably frame that element as capitalist critique, but the fact that movie is so interested in the "how", how this company functions, how these characters interact, how these characters think*, makes it a much richer experience.

*I knocked the movie a little as I don't think it quite evokes the genius of Lazaridis and Fregin, but I appreciate that doing so might be a difficult task. I think a movie like Tim's Vermeer manages to capture the thrill but also the actual process of solving such a problem, but it also is able to frame its problems in less abstract and more tactile terms.