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Midweek Movie Free Talk
Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.
Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.
This is only going to be tangentially related to movies. I like watching interviews with actors when they’re promoting a film. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is starting its big marketing push so Jenna Ortega recently did an interview with Vanity Fair.
It’s shocking how smart, insightful, and eloquent she is for her age. I first got that vibe from her when she presented at the 2023 Golden Globes and mentioned a French movie I’ve never heard of. But it’s so refreshing to see someone like that when most people in the industry her age wouldn’t be able to form sentences like that.
To give an example, Millie Bobby Brown saying she lacks the attention span to watch a movie despite also being a producer on a couple of Netflix films she starred in.
It’s just so nice to see someone who actually likes movies and is passionate about them, and actually watches them.
Leaned heavily into some world cinema film festivals type of movies this last week.
Chinese A Touch of Sin from 2013 which for best screenplay at Cannes. It is sort of anthology film with four stories that are only by a common theme of random violence, usually stemming from a frustration with unfairness in society and loosely based on real events. What I found interesting is that the movie made it seem like it was an inner dark fantasy that played out. Like you might silently fantasize about shooting that annoying boss in the head, and the scenes here play out like an explosive rage of power fantasy.
From Argentina Clandestine Childhood from 2012 which won numerous Argentinean film awards. It plays out as mostly a fairly whimsical almost feel good charming coming of age story. Only the viewpoint is told from a 11 year old boy whose parents are in the resistance group during the dictatorship in Argentina in 1979, so his childhood isn't quite normal. Their house is a meeting point for other resistance fighters, they have weapons stored and installed secret hiding rooms in case the police comes. But he just wants a normal childhood with things like birthday parties and maybe a girlfriend. It is an interesting combination of rose-tinted childhood memories with political violence happening in the background on the edge of this boys understanding.
Abbas Kiarostami's films has been hit and miss for me, and The Wind Will Carry Us from 1999 which won the Silver Lion in Venice, is sort of in between. It feels somewhat similar to Life, and Nothing More with a "city person" arriving in a remote village where life is a lot more primitive, but also calmer. Throughout the film the engineer struggles with connecting with this village even though he is open minded and friendly. From practical and quite hilarious problems of not getting a proper phone signal, having to quickly drive up a tall hill when he gets a call, to his everyday conversations with the villagers that balances on slight misunderstandings. The city-life tempo of needing things to happen clashes with the more primitive but peaceful life out here.
I tried two films by Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Zanussi. The Structure of Crystal from 1969 didn't do much for me as it basically two men discussing their different life philosophies, but I liked his style enough to give a chance The Constant Factor from 1980 which won the Jury Prize at Cannes. It gives a more engaging and traditional narrative with a young man's foray into working adult life, but he finds his good-natured ethics constantly challenged by corruption and people cheating the system for personal gain. Some obvious political system critique hidden in plain sight here.
I had a great deal of fun with Justine Triet's Sibyl from 2019. It is heavily packed within the 100 minute runtime. In some ways it is kind of a mess with several storylines happening at once, but it also sort of works and I really liked it. What happens to Sibyl is an equal amount of giant mess, so it is fitting. I was especially impressed with the editing, that manages to keep things together despite the frequent quick jumps between past, present, daydreams and fiction. The tempo can sometimes be on the edge of exhausting but I was never lost, as the great (fittingly overly dramatic) performances and the editing held things together.
The best however was the Danish film Uncle from 2019, winner at the Tokyo Film Festival. I rarely seek out films from my own country, because I find most Danish to fall into the formulaic categories of standard crime thriller, historical drama or romcom with the same actors over and over. This however is a very small film and clearly a personal important project for the director René Frelle Petersen, who not only directs, but have also written, edited, filmed and produced. This is a slow film that demands patience. It doesn't reward the patience with some big payoff in the end. What is does give is a deep character portrait of a women struggling with her internal conflict between own ambitions and her strong sense of taking care of family. Losing her parents at a young age, she has lived with her uncle who is now old and frail, so she basically runs the farm by herself. She clearly cares deeply for him, and maybe feels some guilt and sense of duty to take care of him and the farm. What makes this a great film is how everything comes from herself. The uncle isn't mean or anything, he doesn't expect or demand anything from her. Outside factors exposes what she is missing, like an abandoned ambition to became a veterinarian and romantic relationships that she can't seem to fully embrace, but she holds herself back again and again. The narrative builds up in a way that make you expect a specific development, a hopeful outcome, but instead it surprises with sort of a reset. Not a massive big twist or anything. The ending is neither tragic or hopeful, more like a quiet resignation that could go either way. The genius I think lies with that choice. As a viewer we don't get any definitive payoff or resolution, but it is not ambiguous either.
A lot of these sound very interesting.....is there a way to watch smaller, non US films online?
Criterion Channel and Mubi are probably your best bet. I saw most of these on Mubi, though selection varies by country. I can send 30 days free invite codes for Mubi if anyone is interested.
I'm interested! :D thank you for sharing
I'd like to watch Clandestine Childhood first. Might be a nice palette cleanser from the time I watched (without regrets) Zone Of Interest. This story telling, of small things happening in the foreground with larger historical only as a minor backdrop, really appeals to me.
Finally watched The Whale(2022)
I thought Branden Fraser did a fantastic job. As did Sadie Sink, who plays the daughter. Wonderful little one-room play full of complex characters and difficult, heavy life stuff. Charlie is a deeply tragic character, and the story is full of sympathy for someone in so much pain, so flawed and so desperate for love. Perhaps the biggest tragedy is that he couldn't understand he is loved, and deeply, by Mary and Ellie and Liz, despite his woundedness and unloveliness.
[long rant] but. Something the daughter said early on sums up the movie for me:
Charlie disgusts me, and not because of his body or that he's gay, but because Charlie is a narcissist. It's in every detail of the movie.But first, a note that narcissism does not always mean puffed up, self grandiose, manifest destiny, gods gift to all kind of personality. It can be, but it can be its dark reverse: someone who is so down on themselves they can't focus on anything or anyone else in the world except for themselves. We know that Narcissis sat by a pool and gazed continually at his own reflection, but it's also possible that he hated himself so much could not bear to look away. The Issendai blog has a collection of heart wrenching accounts from narcissistic parents whose estranged children have missing missing reasons - these parents are very much like Charlie: they bleed and cry and suffer and sacrifice but they cannot understand why their love isn't returned by their estranged children. The reasons for them being missing are missing: they can't understand why they love so much and yet it isn't returned. The truth is that these praents are so wrapped up into themselves that they cannot even process words spoken to their faces, written with tear stained letters, by children who are screaming to be seen.
We find out that Ellie and Mary needed money badly during these 8 years. Charlie only sends what they need a month at a time because he's very focused on gifting Ellie a large heroic sum when his suicide is completed.
Throughout the movie Charlie kept saying that Mary was keeping him from Ellie, but this is the actual truth:
CHARLIE: You fought me pretty hard for full
custody. And I don’t blame you for
keeping her from me, I--
MARY: Charlie, need I remind you: you left us
CHARLIE: I know...
MARY: And I was left raising our kid and explaining to people that my husband left me for a man.
CHARLIE: But you didn’t have to cut me out
of her life like that--
MARY: Oh please, you were more than happy
to forget about us for a while. You know that.
They hadn't seen each other in 8 years and he blames her twice in three lines of dialogue, fully in denial of who was responsible and who was already emotionally checked-out before physically disappearing.
In the last scene, we see Ellie pleading "please, daddy", to please live and not abandon her again. But it goes unnoticed by Charlie. She doesn't need money, she needs a dad. She needed a dad 8 years ago and she still needs him to live, but Charlie is incapable of seeing his daughter outside of his totally unrealistic characature of being "perfect" and "a good writer" - it's notable that the thing he most love about her is still a reflection of himself as an English teacher.
And the money thing is idiotic. If he can save up $120k in 8 years, and he can keep teaching remotely, even if he only provides money, he can gift her so much more money by continuing to live.
But he doesn't want to provide for her in ways she wants, he can only love her in the way he finds acceptable: with his suicide being halo'd a martyr's sacrifice, and with her being gifted a heroic sum. He said, "needed to know I did one thing right in my life", while completely denying the opportunity to be there for Liz, to provide comfort for her loss of Alan. And he already did do something right, to give Alan the best years of his short life. But Charlie couldn't remain faithful to Mary, he couldn't see Liz's needs, he couldn't acknowledge Ellie's pleading for him to live.
There's another scene that's particularly disgusting. Mary is telling Charlie about how hard Alan's last few months were, and his response: "it was awful for me too". Classic narcissism, pain Olympics gold medal: no nobody is hurt as much as they are.
That beloved essay on Moby Dick? Mary sent it to him four years ago when he asked how she was doing. It got a C-, and instead of talking about the obvious whale or narrative structure, she wrote about two men sharing a bed. A parent who is willing to actually look at their child would see a child in pain and struggling, not "a strong writer" and so "honest" and perfect.
We can even see a small version of this self love when he swore at his class and applauded their pain as "honesty", then literally rage quit class, without any concern for the mental wellbeing of these young people having just witnessed a selfish and aggressive breakdown, who will surely be told next week he has died.
The movie began with Charlie masturbating alone to self sooth and for his self oriented satisfaction, and basically continues right through to the end.
And that's what makes this a great film. Even someone this wounded is still loveable, and is beloved.
I wrote about this back when it came out. I don't remember writing so much, so that was a little surprising to see when I dug it up.
I agree with your analysis of the character, and that is one of the reasons why I relate so much to Charlie (on top of the overeating). The overeating scenes, really the self-harm scenes, playing with a horror-like score really affected me emotionally. Because that's exactly what I did.
This movie actually served as motivation for me to finally lose the remaining extra weight I had throughout 2023. I have a picture that shows me January 2023 and December 2023 and it is such a stark difference, it was basically the start of my new life. And I credit The Whale for that final push.
!! Thank you for linking to your review. I didn't know anything else about the movie going in, other than that Brendan Fraser is in it and he plays a big guy, and that the movie earned him accolades. I didn't realize there was a fatphobic criticism.....was it generated by people on behalf of others or genuinely people were offended? Also, I didn't realise this was a play and that the playwright had similar experiences.
It was heartbreaking watching Charlie's character. I had some hopes that he could have made a different decision, but I also understand it would take too much out of a person and not everyone has the support or the ability to withstand what must be a nearly insurmountable amount of pain to be able to do so. And you were right that it's about an addiction: the story could also have been told of someone ED who's extremely thin or to drugs or alcohol or heck, I once knew a guy who tried to quit smoking and became addicted to apples. He was eating 3+ lbs a day.
Addictions are about pain, I think. About trying to staunch an invisible bleeding wound and trying to escape an invisible fire.
Unrelated to the movie, but congratulations on your new life! Glad to have you with us for hopefully a much while longer yet.
Half and half, I would say. I do remember a tweet saying "I think it's funny that most of the criticism is coming from people who have been skinny most of their lives." A lot of it felt really performative, and all the criticism came from people that refused to even engage with the film.
I think the film fits nicely with Aaranofsky's other work. Requiem, Black Swan, and The Wreslter are all about addiction/obsession and how it can destroy you both physically and mentally. The Whale examines the same thing but because it's about obsession with food it becomes this problematic fatphobic thing. It'd be like if someone said Requiem was drugaddictphobic.
Its putting thin/standard sized actors in a fat suit rather than hiring fat actors that I have a problem with. It's also the main criticism I've heard from other fat folks And unnecessarily but for clarity, I'm fat, though on the smaller end of the fat scale as we measure things.
And I addressed that in my linked comment from two years ago. Fraser’s not thin and 600lb actors don’t exist. George Clooney was originally attached to direct and tried to find an actual 600lb man to play the role but it didn’t work out.
Even then, I feel like people act like fat suits are the equivalent of black face or something when it’s just not the case. Actors have to be able to act otherwise everyone’s just gonna be playing themselves.
I know he put on weight for the movie but I believe he's typically standard sized. (As in he can buy clothes off the shelf in the normal men's dept at stores if he chooses).
Acting is not the same thing as wearing a fat suit and there are actors between his weight and 600lbs that do exist and could potentially have been cast. I think it's perfectly reasonable to be unhappy about the casting and constant use of fatsuits. Acting and wearing one are two separate things. I didn't compare it to blackface.
I brought it up because it wasn't mentioned in your comment above and it's the primary reason I've heard this movie called fatphobic. Now it was in your comment previously and I disagree that it's ridiculous.