kid charlemagne

Well-known member
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rubberdingyrapids

Well-known member
the new alex garland one about iraq is quite good, the first time i've seen someone try to portray a firefight in that war accurately (and that's literally all the film is, it's just that)

i saw baby invasion, cool coz he's trying to do something no-one has done before but it's very boring and pretty ugly

the budgets have clearly seeped out of everything. am finding that the stuff in cinemas is quite interesting though, even if it's not particularly good. it's like the film people are all unmoored. trying to work out what to do and how to crack the code, what the possibilities are at the moment. there's a certain exploration to the new films i'm seeing, from the indie ones to the more mainstream ones

warfare was okay. more of an exercise though. should have been a VR installation thing.
agree that there are lots of quite good but not that good films around, but which do you see that are exploratory in terms of new possibilties?
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
warfare was okay. more of an exercise though. should have been a VR installation thing.
agree that there are lots of quite good but not that good films around, but which do you see that are exploratory in terms of new possibilties?
good question. and i'm talking from my own perspective only, it's not like i'm systematically auditing these things.

one thing i see is an adaptation to the lack of money left in movies. something like warfare isn't exactly made on a shoestring and isn't in the indie film zero budget world, but you can see that even someone like alex garland can't raise unlimited money for something like this. i think you can see that the people who make these kinds of second-tier film have got used to these constraints. i think you can see that everyone is used to digital now as well, the unlimited nature of it changes what people are making, as well as the obvious thing about how it looks, how similar to TV it all looks, and so on.

other obvious stuff in the mainstream: the pace, the durational tiktok thing. poor things, barbie, everything everywhere all at once, the nolan stuttering thing. the movies adapting to the way audiences relate to screens in general. in addition to that outside the mainstream: phone footage as part of the movie. AI movies, eg the last two harmony korine ones, which aren't good but which are pushing out there into new territory.

the auto-everything trend. so many movies which are autofiction. my first film, gasoline rainbow, good one. warfare as well is maybe not autofiction but is still obviously very auto in that it's a faithful recreation of a war that one of the directors lived through. there's this very direct interest in people digging through their memories and putting them on screen. in general i see a lot of movies now which are very personal.

a lot of formal twists as well. people have been breaking the standard parameters of film for nearly a hundred years obviously. but in the stuff i see i feel like there aren't even parameters anymore, it's been shattered. i think there's a freedom in the money being gone, there's less to play for, and the cheapness of digital seems to make life easier as well.

something like bird is a good example, that's one of the best things i've seen recently. it's a weird film which i think is essentially about angels, or at least that's what i jump to prompted by the burial soundtrack. it's hard to pin down stylistically, although the easy thing to jump to is 'magical realism' i don't think that catches it at all. anora was another one, in that it's a mainstream film but also has these jarring changes of tone and this sense of not really knowing what kind of film you're in.

all feels like the earthquake has passed and people aren't clinging on to the old world anymore
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
i think with warfare it's good that someone bothered to make it basically. the war on terror is in the past now. it's good that someone documents it. i got the impression that it's a film made for the americans that fought in it. there's a lot of them, those wars went on for a long time and people were not doing long tours, so a lot of people cumulatively went to fight. i don't think anyone has made a faithful recreation of what that was like - you have jarhead and idk american sniper, zero dark thirty, the hurt locker, and that kind of thing. but warfare was going for truth i think, quite squarely, it wasn't trying to make much of a point or use those wars as a way of exploring themes or critiquing or bigging up the troops. i found it very humane

it's a bit like frances ha in a way, in how it tries to explain what a particular time and milieu was like
 

version

Well-known member
one thing i see is an adaptation to the lack of money left in movies. something like warfare isn't exactly made on a shoestring and isn't in the indie film zero budget world, but you can see that even someone like alex garland can't raise unlimited money for something like this.

Anora and The Brutalist storming the Oscars seemed like a positive development along these lines. Both reportedly made for under $10m. Maybe that's 'Hollywood accounting', but whatever the real figure is it's clearly going to be lower than most budgets.

i think with warfare it's good that someone bothered to make it basically. the war on terror is in the past now. it's good that someone documents it. i got the impression that it's a film made for the americans that fought in it. there's a lot of them, those wars went on for a long time and people were not doing long tours, so a lot of people cumulatively went to fight. i don't think anyone has made a faithful recreation of what that was like - you have jarhead and idk american sniper, zero dark thirty, the hurt locker, and that kind of thing. but warfare was going for truth i think, quite squarely, it wasn't trying to make much of a point or use those wars as a way of exploring themes or critiquing or bigging up the troops. i found it very humane

You seen Generation Kill?
 

version

Well-known member
i haven't. any good?

Yeah, I liked it. Still a bit slick and cheesy because it's an HBO thing by one of the guys behind The Wire, but was a different sort of angle for that kind of story. A lot of it's the marines just hanging around, bored. Some of the officers are completely useless. The gear doesn't work or never arrives. Bit messier than the usual narrative.
 
Watched two alex garland films recently, Warfare and civil war. What’s he gonna call the next one? Guns? Soldiers?

Warfare was very impressive, focuses on troops under attack within an Iraqi community and (seemingly) very realistic in terms of the dialogue, all military jargon, lots of waiting around, long takes, lots of horrible moaning and screaming whic just goes on and on and on. Despite an attempt at neutrality and being horrifying throughout out the Iraqi people barely feature and this will continue to function quite well as US propaganda

Civil war had some beautiful aerial shots and juxtapositional score choices. Follows a press team covering a future US civil. It achieves some interesting effects using photographs captured by the team that, by contrast, make the long sweeping shots of warfare feel all the more ‘real’, a nice comment on sensational blood thirty media military industrial complex. It’s also a bit unrealistic as jarring at points but a really affecting style. @Corpsey also features in a brilliant cameo
 

luka

Well-known member
no fucking way its actually him!!! #corpseyface @Corpsey @Corpsey @Corpsey @Corpsey @Corpsey @Corpsey @Corpsey @Corpsey
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yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
watched "sinners" last night i thought it was quite good. it's rare when a movie incorporates music and singing without making it feel like you're watching a cheap musical. i did think though that the movie could've been a lot better if they had cut out a few scenes. and something that i'm always annoyed by is the fact that directors seem to have this urge to always throw in one or two dumb jokes, or give the movie a slightly comedic tone, and it always feels so obligatory - maybe it's the production companies that demand this? it could've been a cool and dark movie but the jokes were dumb and embarrassing and felt out of place.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
this mountainhead tv movie thing reminds me so much of the dudes it's quite scary. @Clinamenic is in there i'm sure they're quoting verbatim from his posts
I haven't seen the show but I'm sure I'd make for an even more eccentric billionaire. I manage to be quite eccentric with an annual income of approx $30k, imagine the cocktails I could make if I had the GDP of a small nation.
 
watched "sinners" last night i thought it was quite good. it's rare when a movie incorporates music and singing without making it feel like you're watching a cheap musical. i did think though that the movie could've been a lot better if they had cut out a few scenes. and something that i'm always annoyed by is the fact that directors seem to have this urge to always throw in one or two dumb jokes, or give the movie a slightly comedic tone, and it always feels so obligatory - maybe it's the production companies that demand this? it could've been a cool and dark movie but the jokes were dumb and embarrassing and felt out of place.
It's a mess, but I loved it. I went in with no preconceptions so the dark turn was great. and yes it was musical the whole way without being a musical, content and the rhythm and pacing and editing style. the dancing scenes were really good, even vampire riverdance. on paper id be disgusted but thye made it eerie and funny at the same time. could have been awful, wacky, cheesy but they treaded the line. dont know what jokes you're referring to but i think a little comic tone gave the whole thing bouyancy and flexibility and allowed all kinds of strangeness to occur while you just go along for the ride
 
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