“Perfect“ films
- Thread starter Elpenor
- Start date
Orang Utan
Psychick Worrier Ov Geyoor
He sounds very posh when talking in his real voice. Not a very convincing hard man
Orang Utan
Psychick Worrier Ov Geyoor
He grew up in Pendlebury!
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
I thought he was very convincing in Sexy Beast. Not sure what his real voice has to do with anything. He's an actor.
Reno
The In Kraut
Not really that interested in the usual Urban nitpicking of who is and isn't posh and who therefore can or can't do an accent. If a large part of the family you grow up around working class and you are a talented actor, then it's not too hard to imagine that you can use that in your work convincingly even if you went to a private school.
Enjoyed the making of Sexy Beast. They could only afford Kingsley for a couple of days. Winston said Kingsley arrived 'off the plane' in character and Winston said he found him scary.
yeah, in this (substantial, detatched) house. Lowry lived next door apparently (though not at the same time)
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
No.
I don't think Sexy Beast is quite as amazing as some people think it is. It's a bit formulaic and predictable, imo. But Kingsley is definitely the best thing in it.
Reno
The In Kraut
Fuck no. Jonathan Glazer is the opposite of Guy Ritchie.
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
Agree re Under the Skin. It’s a brilliant film. Cannot agree on the heist. It’s masterfully paced, it’s totally knowing and just enjoyably daft in terms of the interrelationships between the crew. The clothes, the meal, the class angle. It’s brilliant stuff
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
Glad to see ‘sexy beast’ got a debate going.
My second perfect film is The Deer Hunter.
The first half of the film is a hypnotic close reconstruction of sixties working class America at the end of the post war boom. It’s note perfect in terms of class relations, crumbing reactionary gender politics and the social and cultural (and coming economic) tensions bubbling under that would soon be pour out due to war, the new left, deindustrialisation, the oil crisis and the rise of neo-conservativism. The end of a era at its inception.
The second half, as a comment on the dehumanising experience of war and on power is gut wrenching.
Those who criticise it for not showing war from the Viet Cong perspective, who quibble about the accuracy of the Russian Roulette scene or moan (preposterously) that it’s too long have missed it’s meta narrative: that this is a close study of working class experience from the rust belt.
My second perfect film is The Deer Hunter.
The first half of the film is a hypnotic close reconstruction of sixties working class America at the end of the post war boom. It’s note perfect in terms of class relations, crumbing reactionary gender politics and the social and cultural (and coming economic) tensions bubbling under that would soon be pour out due to war, the new left, deindustrialisation, the oil crisis and the rise of neo-conservativism. The end of a era at its inception.
The second half, as a comment on the dehumanising experience of war and on power is gut wrenching.
Those who criticise it for not showing war from the Viet Cong perspective, who quibble about the accuracy of the Russian Roulette scene or moan (preposterously) that it’s too long have missed it’s meta narrative: that this is a close study of working class experience from the rust belt.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Watched Under the Skin last night cos of this thread.
Read up on it after watching, and I hadn't realised that many of the characters really were randoms off the street who'd been picked up. That really works. The first half when she's roaming the streets/clubs in search of victims is compelling, and there are some amazingly brutal moments and shots - the dog and people in the sea, for instance, that whole scene is brilliantly done - but when she became lost and confused, so did I a little bit.
I'm still mulling it over.
Read up on it after watching, and I hadn't realised that many of the characters really were randoms off the street who'd been picked up. That really works. The first half when she's roaming the streets/clubs in search of victims is compelling, and there are some amazingly brutal moments and shots - the dog and people in the sea, for instance, that whole scene is brilliantly done - but when she became lost and confused, so did I a little bit.
I'm still mulling it over.
Reno
The In Kraut
Some of the men she chats with in the van were random people filmed with hidden cameras, the ones she picks up all knew they were in a film.Watched Under the Skin last night cos of this thread.
Read up on it after watching, and I hadn't realised that many of the characters really were randoms off the street who'd been picked up. That really works. The first half when she's roaming the streets/clubs in search of victims is compelling, and there are some amazingly brutal moments and shots - the dog and people in the sea, for instance, that whole scene is brilliantly done - but when she became lost and confused, so did I a little bit.
I'm still mulling it over.
I took a while to make up my mind about the film. It's based on a novel by Michel Faber which I love and which is far more concrete as to what is going on. Initially the film was going to be faithful to the book, but it would have been an expensive film which would have required a lot of special effects work, so Glazer decided to strip out most of the plot, keep the barest outline and to concentrate on the tone and atmosphere of the book. Once I made the adjustment and accepted that the film is its own thing, I came to love it, having revisited it several times.
The film refuses to be that concrete but in essence it's about an alien being who regards us the way we would regard cattle, as a resource to be harvested. Eventually she becomes curious about her human shell and she develops empathy, which is her downfall. The climactic sexual assault comes from the book, but it happens earlier and plays out differently. It's where she starts questioning her mission and her superiors. In the film that moment comes when she doesn't kill the man with neurofibromatosis. The motorcyclist is the equivalent of other alien characters in the book, especially her boss, who retains his alien form in the novel.
The book is a satirical allegory of class, sexism and the ethnics of factory farming, of which just traces remain in the film. There also is an overwhelming sense of melancholy, existential loneliness and menace in the novel, which the film captures perfectly.
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Elpenor
Dancing as fast as I can
When I watched it recently I reflected on the end when they sing God Bless America. I couldn’t decide what I thought about it, I wasn’t sure it was ironic. In the end I decided they sang it out of a desperate need to believe in the America they’d been brought up on given all they’d lost.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Yeah, the motorcyclist confused me a bit. I also realised that the best thing to do was sit back and let it wash over me.
She barely says a word after she's lost in the fog. Does she even say one word? Not sure. It's a hell of a transformation and switching of roles.
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
Good point. I understand it as a sort of lament for the death of the American dream for the organised American working class. War, unemployment, the fracturing of the nuclear family, ideas of masculinity, identity and, I think, a certain innocence. The point at which millions of lives were about to go backwards
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Perfect = Favourite?
Blade Runner is one of my favourite films. It it beautifully filmed, cast, scored and left questions open about a possible future of humanity. The Alien/Aliens films much the same for me.
There are timeless comedies like Airplane, Young Frankenstein, Groundhog Day, Blues Brothers (also a musical) that I will never tire of.
Jaws was far from 'perfect' but an amazing film.
One could argue (and I will) that Watership Down is a perfect film. In fact if I have to die on any hill it will be this hill.
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Watership Down is not a perfect film. It's an adaption of a book that's got a large cast of characters and several mini adventures. The film has an insoluble problem of bringing the different characters into play in all the various sub plots while maintaining a relatively short snappy rounded film. Eg. Dandelion is barely in the film at all, Strawberry is edited out completely, Clover appears as an independently minded doe and then disappears from the narrative completely. It's not perfect, it was never going to be a perfect film, more to the point it wasn't aspiring to perfection the film makers makers very clearly made a decision to role with it despite the inherent problems. Much more importantly Watership Down is so much more than mere perfection.
You can imagine a perfectly told story or a perfectly shot sequence or some perfect editing maybe even perfect acting (or at least something close to some notion of perfection). But can you have a film that is perfectly thought provoking, a film that perfectly invests you in a broader mythology, that perfectly resonates with you at a certain point in your life or that perfectly discusses ideas such as death or camaraderie. A perfect film is a film that is easy to watch, that slips down your throat with the minimum of resistance but need not contribute anything of broader cultural significance. Perfect is perfectly forgettable.
If you love Watership Down, please don't call it perfect. It's a serious disservice to a wonderful film. Looking for perfect films is a game for Cowslip Warren rabbits.
Talking about the Cowslip Warren, that episode in the film is undermined by showing the story of El-ahrairah at the start. Whereas it makes cinematic sense showing that story at the start, in the book it's a story told by Dandelion at the Cowslip Warren and it shows the Sandleford rabbits both rediscovering and reasserting their own mythology, it's not just a mythology that forms a basis for the story, it's a mythology that the rabbits own and have to fight for. In the film that's sort of there but it's more Fiver having bad feelings which are then confirmed by events, that little battle for ideas is pretty much lost in the film. That may not be a problem, the film doesn't need to follow the book, but the film does follow the book quite closely while simplifying it. They could have just dropped the Cowslip section (they dropped Strawberry anyway) and more time could have been spent Clover or Violet ('Violet's gone!', who?).
None of this undermines the film's power and it encourages you to read the book and it complements the book beautifully. But here we trying find the perfect flayrah for a pleasant afternoon silflay, and broader ideas, thoughts, feelings and world building simply will not do. The Cowslip Warren is a close relative of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and it was Huxley who invented the concept of a perfect film, films in Brave New World were called feelies. Perfect consumption - you got to feel everything.
None of this undermines the film's power and it encourages you to read the book and it complements the book beautifully. But here we trying find the perfect flayrah for a pleasant afternoon silflay, and broader ideas, thoughts, feelings and world building simply will not do. The Cowslip Warren is a close relative of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and it was Huxley who invented the concept of a perfect film, films in Brave New World were called feelies. Perfect consumption - you got to feel everything.
Of course the central problem with Watership Down is that it paints a rabbits eye view of the world while anthropomorphising the rabbits. Is that an imperfection? Of course it is. It doesn't make sense if you examine closely. The solution of course is to plough on regardless of any nagging worries about the coherence of the world view. But the book (and film) throw this back at you regardless. The story is told in English and the rabbits speak English (which is of course absurd) but they also incongruously have their own words for certain things. We have a word for "car" or "automobile" but for the rabbits it is a "hrududu". Same object with two different names in the same language, is it a different thing or the same thing? None of this makes sense. But of course the rabbits have a very different relation with hrududu than we do and this is a fairly profound point about language, it is not just a method of labelling things but a way of talking about your relationship with things. The object-subject dichotomy is not absolute, there is something of the subject in the object.
So here we have a deeply baked in conceptual flaw throwing up a broader discussion point. Sometimes things are interesting not despite their flaws but because of them.
So here we have a deeply baked in conceptual flaw throwing up a broader discussion point. Sometimes things are interesting not despite their flaws but because of them.
It's quite boring though.
I can.
T & P
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Take the blue pill and go back to your office cubicle already
