Films The Official bit-tech Movie Thread - What have you seen lately?

Cop Shop https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5748448/
Brilliantly terrible / 10, about 30 minutes too long but an decent low rent telling of the usual story.

 

Bit of a round up because I didnt post in this thread last year!

The Mole Agent - 9/10
You want your heart strings pulled? Well this is the documentary film for you. Beautiful stuff.
Magnolia - 9/10
What a journey!
Dune - 9/10
Loved it and genuinely felt they did a great job based on the source material. Only two small gripes

Spoiler

No banquet scene and Liet Keynes death was offensively bad compared to the book chapter

My Octopuss Teacher - 8.5/10
Incredible underwater scene in this documentary
Mulholland Drive - 8.5/10
Pretty intense stuff, my interpretation seemed to be different from the rest of the internet!
Judas and the Black Messiah - 8/10
I could watch Danial Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield all day, so it was great to see them in this together.
Collateral - 8/10
Put it off for ages, but pretty good.
Prisoners - 8/10
Jake Gyllenhaal being a bad ass cop, yes please!
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me - 7.5/10
It was a big mistake to watch this before series 1 and 2 of the show, so the film didnt make complete sense and was very harrowing.
Under the Silver Lake - 7.5/10
Super weird and probably needs repeat viewing. I'm guessing some will love it, some will hate it. Lots of reddit fan theory on this!
El Hoyo (The Platform) - 7/10
Very good, doesnt out stay its well come, the obvious commentary on society doesnt outstay its welcome.
High Life - 7/10
Pretty weird, but I did find it gripping.
Cape Fear - 7/10
Psycho De Niro!
Soul - 7/10
It's no Coco but its not bad
Cache - 7/10
I enjoyed this little number, although i see a couple of recent reviews here panning it!
Moana - 6.5/10
I was entertained (by The Rock!)
Fist Fight - 6/10
Amusing but thats about it
Dark Waters - 5/10
Meh, interesting but I could have got the vital info from wikipedia
Annihilation - 2.5/10
Some great visuals and potential for great concepts, but the plot is held together by wet tissue

Rewatched some ultra classics and reaffirmed my love for each:
There Will Be Blood
Aliens
Terminator 2
Blade 2
The Matrix

 

I disagree about Annihilation, because I don't think the plot is the point at all, any more than faithfully depicting a scene is the point of surrealist paintings, but I totally get the Alex Garland's style of film making is really not in vogue or well appreciated right now. Dan Olson has a good video exploring why it was so misunderstood, and with such a superficial and literal-minded take in most cases.

I'm not in the habit of trying to persuade people to like particular artworks - it's such a daft thing to do and misses the point of how art works, doesn't it? It's an emotional connection. Watching some nerd explain why ahcktchually it's very clever/deep/well-made/you-just-didn't-get-it isn't going to change the emotional connection you have, or don't have, with the film. It's either your bag or it isn't.

But...occasionally the lack of enjoyment is simply because we sit down expecting a film to be one kind of thing, and it's entirely another. This happened to me with Fargo, Scott Pilgrim, and several Tarantino films. I later enjoyed them for what they were, prepared and knowing what they were going to be.

So it might help to at least know why Annihilation appears to have so little plot or coherence. It's not a bug, it's a feature. It's metaphorical storytelling. The focus of the film is on its themes, studied through its characters, not its events (which barely amount to anything). It's meditative, philosophical, and deliberately ambiguous. Alex Garland is an arty farty director, he deals in symbolic imagery and metaphors.

This won't make you like it any more in hindsight - and it shouldn't! You don't have to like it. But it might better equip you to predict what you'll fail to enjoy, and why. Annihilation succeeded brilliantly in its goals; it's one of the best art films in decades. But it was advertised entirely as a band-vs-the-environment sci-fi flick, which led to a lot of resentment and confusion.

The take-home is not that Annihilation is crap, but that you don't like art films full of metaphor, which is fine - most people don't like them. It's fine.

If anything, we just need a better way to signpost to audiences that a film falls into this arty farty territory, because if you love this stuff, it's quite hard to find on purpose, and if you hate it, watching one is like stepping on an exceptionally boring landmine.

Sunshine, another Alex Garland weird-out trip, failed as a sci-fi film but succeeded as a character piece because, like Annhiliation, it used its sci-fi set pieces as analogies for the characters' internal journeys and feelings, to examine their emotional turmoil and baggage, rather than as tools to tell an actual sci-fi story, and consequently got a lot of the same mixed response.

It's hard to give films like this a score, because it depends so much on what you're expecting and what you want. If you expect and want a vague, metaphorical dark night of the soul, full of symbolism and thought-provoking character moments, then these films are both at least a 7/10. If you neither want nor expect that, then they're a 1. Of course, the marketing teams are in a hard place, because very few people expect and want that, but lots of people expect and want conventional sci-fi band-of-heroes stories, so when a weirdo like Alex Garland hands them a philosophical art film that has the superficial appearance of a conventional sci-fi film, it's tempting to market it as one.

Personally I fell somewhere in the middle; I got what Sunshine and Annihilation were doing, but I have to be in the mood for it.

I just clocked that part of my irritation at Caché was that it was trying to evoke the mood and techniques of a metaphorical art film, but it didn't actually contain any meaningful metaphor or symbolism, and was therefore tediously slow and vague without the payoff of resonant emotional moments and character journeys. It set itself up with a few interesting themes (like the middle-class alienation of the dad character, and his lingering guilt about his immoral and evil behaviour as a child) but then did nothing with them. The ending doesn't tie into them, the ambiguity doesn't feel relevant. Annihilation, Inception, Memento: these films had deliberately ambiguous endings that directly pushed you to think about the main themes. Caché's ambiguous ending feels irrelevant to its themes.

ANYWAY. Collateral was overlooked and underrated at the time, I thought. A long-time favourite, proves that Jamie Foxx has real acting chops, despite some of the dross he's settled for appearing in.

My Octopus Teacher made me cry, which in turn made me feel that I've probably hit middle age and should just have kids already.

 

Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed response.

Annihilation
I wouldn't say I am against films full of metaphor or "artsy" films, but I genuinely switched off when they suggested

Spoiler

the shimmer refracted DNA, conceptually this does not work for me and it was clear that the shimmer wasn't malicious in intent but appeared to use something akin to genetic programming to splice DNA and mutate things in random way at an incredible rate (Quite a cool concept!). I'm led to believe the book is good but doesn't provide answers as, like you say, it's also about the character journey more than the hard facts

I would be interested to know what you think this film is trying to do that I am missing?

Spoiler

Is it asking what it is to be human? Ex Machina did a better job!

It seemed to be a handful of vague artistic set pieces strung together.

Looking through Alex Garlands credits on IMDB i'm a massive fan of Ex Machina, and most of the other stuff I have seen, but Annihilation is the outlier for me....... All that aside, I think we can agree, this film isn't for me!

Cache
I agree the final scene seemed pointless but I enjoyed the exploration of guilt. I believe the Algerian Paris Massacre is briefly mentioned in the film and I think the film was attempting to tackle the French guilt for the event. Similarly to Annihilation if you focus on the "who done it" aspect you may be missing the point.

[Edit: The layout is horrible with these spoiler tags! Sorry!]

 

Quote of the month so far!

 

Ah, I just reread my post and it does kinda sound like I'm implying you've 'missed the point', which isn't what I was going for at all. I was surprised that you had such a bad time with Annihilation, because it looks like we otherwise have really similar taste in films and I loved and savoured it. So I tried to reason it out from the perspective of, "if I disliked this film, why would I dislike it?" Going into it with misaligned expectations, and watching it as the wrong kind of thing altogether, was my first guess. But I wouldn't presume to know that you missed anything. In all probability, you got as much out of it as I did. Our different experiences of it remain a mystery to me.

I can only speak to what I loved about Annihilation, and what I thought it was doing right. The central plot device - the alien shimmer - is an unknowable macguffin, a Pulp Fiction briefcase, to me. Nothing more. I don't think it matters. I'd actually forgotten that there is expository jargon dialogue trying to explain what it does in scientific terms; that's a failing on Alex Garland's part, he tries to use sci-fi plot devices as loose-knit metaphors for emotional stuff going on inside the characters, but then also tries to half-explain the plot devices in literal terms.

In Sunshine, for example, the sun's power and intensity are an expression of oblivion, destruction, the merciless power of nature and the immense unknown of death. The characters' journey towards it becomes a journey into their own heart of darkness, a descent into madness and fear because the thing they're forging towards is incomprehensibly powerful, destructive and unyielding, and their pace is predetermined and unalterable. They can't slow down, they can't stop, they can't turn back, they can't reason, bargain or compromise with it. It will consume them; they will vanish over an event horizon, into the unknown and the unknowable, perhaps into something mystical and other, perhaps into nothing.

And that's ****ing metal, I love it. The sun is a metaphor for the approach of death, and the characters all deal with its steady, inexorable approach in different ways that explore the real ways humans deal with the approach of death. But then Sunshine tries to eat its cake and have it too by explicitly applying a mysticism and magical properties to the sun. These are realised on-screen in moments of magical realism. This is dumb, and bad, because the sun is a giant ball of burning gas, not a mystical entity, and I don't know why the choice was made to disambiguate the film's most ambiguous point in such a hammy fashion.

Annihilation has the same problem, I guess. The ambiguity of the shimmer, the uncertainty of what it is and what it will do to you, of whether you will survive, and the lingering uncertainty afterwards as to whether you are the same person you used to be or not, is the whole point for me. Trying to sci-fi up the shimmer with pseudoscientific jargon totally undermines that. In my affection for the film I'd forgotten about that dialogue, but it's pretty dumb.

Anyway, that dumbness aside, the meat of the film, for me, is similar to Sunshine: a terrifying, inhuman force that shows no mercy or compassion for humans, that underscores our fragility and mutability, that devours us and pushes us to the limits of psychological tolerance. These forces occur in real life, in nature: climate change is an obvious one, and the shimmer's steady inexorable spread reminded me, at first, of the looming threat of climate change. Death is another, and I think Sunshine is leaning that way: the sun is so unfathomably huge and destructive, yet so unknown, apparently final but unknown enough to allow a kind of mad hope, that characters react in very divergent ways: blind terror, mystical rapture, manic aggression and destructiveness, apathy, calm acceptance, eager anticipation, quiet stress.

The shimmer in Annihilation transforms people, so it's more like the horror of the passage of time, and the onset of disease (especially cancer, which gets mentioned repeatedly) rendered into a compact, immediate form. Normally we'd see ourselves subtly change, deteriorate and smush into the environment around us over the scale of decades, experiencing moments of shock and fear once in a while when we suddenly realise that our situation has calcified into a trap that we can't escape, our bodies have betrayed us and begun slowly killing us, age has stolen our faculties or even our identities. The shimmer puts this steady slippage of self from time and disease into overdrive, exposing characters to it on the scale of days and hours, rather than years and decades. As with the sun as a stand-in for death in Sunshine, the shimmer as a stand-in for disease and the passage of time in Annihilation creates reactions in the characters that serve as a study in miniature of humans' reactions to that terror in general. They panic, or jump into violent rebellion, or quietly succumb, or simply despair and beg the sky to stop, or struggle to a place of acceptance and yielding.

One thing I love is that the film's survivors end up agnostic on the whole matter. They calmly but confusedly accept that they don't have a clear sense of self any more, that they don't have control over their own bodies and their futures, that they are being changed by time and will continue to be changed by time. There's a little bit of Zen in there.

The final scene heavily echoes the final scene of Solaris (2002), a film which, now I think about it, Annihilation so strongly resembles that between them they and Sunshine might comprise a new micro-genre. Solaris was polarizing too, a lot of people complained it was pointless and vague and didn't go anywhere or do anything. Its journey was internal: the characters were the thing in motion, and the setting and plot were just devices to make it happen.

I feel naive now for not considering that there might be culturally specific context relevant to Caché that I was missing. If that's the reason I got nothing out of it, I can live with it, I suppose. But it drives home a thought I had a while ago: art is hopelessly entwined in the cultural moment that creates it, so much so that analyzing it from another time and place is always going to be a flawed, clunky transliteration job that misses half of the content. Muslims say you can't actually read the Qur'an without learning Arabic; every translation contains loss. I'd go so far as to say you can't actually read the Qur'an unless you're an Arab in the 4th century CE.

You'll never feel this phenomenon more intensely than when you attend a live Shakespeare play. Proper Shakespeare nerds laugh on cue at all the Elizabethan-era baudy jokes, jokes which make no sense to a modern ear, because they've read the cliffnotes and researched it. As if a culture's spirit, its zeitgeist, can be reconstructed by scholars and transmitted through cliffnotes. There is no sound more artificial, grasping and lonely than those stuck-out-of-time laughs.

I feel like I'm taking myself too seriously so let me just pour silage on my film hipster credentials:

Avatar - 8/10

(details to follow)

 

The kings man 6/10

not bad but unnecessary plot layers cause pacing issues making it feel 30 mins longer than it should.

 

A good doctor (2019) - 7/10 French: Docteur?

Lighthearted, but evil at the same time. Why do only the french make movies like this?

Fast and Furious 9 - 3/10

I mean, no, I don't expect a lot from a F&F movie, but this time the action sequences were thought out by two 8 year olds with matchbox cars, while the rest of the story goes for maximum drama.
Absolute drivel.
Thank god the Hobs and Shaw spinoff is funny.

 

Pocahontas: in spaaaace

 

It'll take more controversy than that to get me to finish my write-up.

I lost track of the Fast & Furious films, but I recently saw the 'parachuting cars' scene on youtube and decided that, if the series hadn't already jumped the shark in a previous installation, that was definitely the shark-jump moment. So ****ing stupid.

 

My brother bleeds F&F, to the point of oblivious fanaticism and even he said the ninth instalment was "not an interesting film".

 

Wrath of Man - I fell asleep / 10

Okay, so I was knackered before starting it and ate my lunch at the start, but how can a film with Stason Jatham and guns in be so mundane that I nod off during it? Stick to Lock Stock style affairs, Guy Ritchie!

Missable.

 

Yet another film I gave up on after less than an hour.

 

I enjoyed reading your musings on Annihilation / Sunshine / Cache! I'll re-watch Sunshine soon as it's been a long time and I have very vague memories.

And for all the flak that Avatar takes, I actually loved it at the time and would roundly agree with your 8/10!

 

The King's Man

An absolute shower / 10

 

Bumbags. I was after watching that King's Man. Not many people seem to think it any good.

Did you all like the first/second though? I thought the first was better than the second.

 

oh the first was brilliant tongue in cheek take on the classic spy films. the second upped it into slapstick sillyness and tried to play it serious. didnt work

 

Yeah, that's an accurate summary.
Did you see the third yet?
Edit: sorry - just seen your review again. Yours was the first that actually got me thinking.

 

What he said.
This new one had promise, a decent cast, reasonable plot as an origins story but ended up a bit of a damp squib

 

So instead of the non-option above then, I decided to go with:

Embattled - 7.9 count/10
Rather enjoyed it - was just (just) different enough from the formula to engage and retain interest without being overly cheesy.