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Watch ALL the movies?
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iulia's birthday earlier this month, I got her tickets to the marathon version of AMC's Best Picture Showcase (they run all nine Best Picture nominees inside of twenty-four hours), which was this weekend. Because we are old--and because Iulia is never, ever, ever allowed to see War Horse and we'd already seen Moneyball and weren't about to skip two movies and somehow still stay up until six AM to see Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close--we merely watched six movies in a row yesterday and called it a night.
Personal highlight: there was trivia between movies, and I managed to win a Girl with the Dragon Tattoo knit hat for knowing who Alan Smithee is. \o/ I'm pretty sure I owe my ability to pop that answer out on command entirely to recently watching a lot of QI, so. Thanks, Stephen Fry.
Things learned for next time:
1) Get there early. Really early. The fourth row is not where you want to be stuck all day, and you will in fact be staying in the same seats pretty much all day. Although after the first two movies were over we got kind of Stockholmed into thinking those seats were just fine.
2) Maybe bring like a pillow and/or an eyemask to help you with any decisions to give up on a movie and go to sleep. Tree of Life, I'm looking at you. Trying not to, but looking at you anyway. Dammit.
3) Smuggle in some kind of snacks that are not movie theater food. Possibly because we are too old for this shit, after about ten or twelve hours of nothing but movie theater food we were both feeling pretty ill and longing for fruit like sailors coming down with scurvy.
4) You can in fact have faith in your fellow moviegoers. There's a very communal atmosphere to the whole thing: you're all in it together for the entire today. No one poached a seat that was marked with so much as a drink left in the cupholder, and it was a lot of fun discussing movies with random people around me. (Or bitching about them. Still looking at you, Tree of Life.)
Thoughts about movies, in the order we saw them:
1. Hugo. Awww, Hugo. ♥ We'd seen the movie before and I liked it but was by no means eager to see it again ASAP, so I was kind of expecting to be bored. But in fact it was still lovely and charming and enchanting and totally drew me in. 3D effects are way more "whoa that's going to hit me" from the fourth row, but I also got shadows/halos/doubling in a lot of places, so: those seats were not optimal.
2. Tree of Life. I did not enjoy this movie.
So, tangent that probably has a lot to do with my compulsion to say something about Tree of Life other than that it's two and a half hours of my life that I'm never getting back: Saturday morning, before leaving for the showcase, I finished reading C. S. Lewis's Studies in Words, which is partly just an interesting etymological case study of some words in English whose meanings have evolved significantly over time, and which can trip up a reader who imposes a modern meaning on an older usage. But it's also a bit of a jeremiad against "verbicide", by which he means, in large part, the sort of watering-down process that makes "awful" and "awesome" mean "bad" and "good" instead of "awe-inspiring". This turns at the end into a discussion of the language used in criticism and thus criticism itself:
So: I feel really incapable of dismissing Tree of Life as bad. I hated it; a lot of people I watched it with hated it; I can understand why people hate it. It's described in the showcase program book as the "impressionistic story of a Midwestern family", and, just to get this out of the way, a) They're in Waco and I'm pretty certain no one inside or outside Texas considers it part of the Midwest, but more importantly, b) I think, if you want to call it a story at all, it's closer to being abstract than impressionistic.
I mean, impressionists give a visual impression that is not photo-realistic or strictly representational, but by and large the viewer still recognizes the thing they're portraying as a visual representation of the thing they're representing. In the absence of any kind of linear narrative, or detectable plot structure, or detectable focus--in the absence, for long portions of the movie, of characters, and for other long portions of the movie the absence of characters who could be firmly identified from one change of scene to the next as the same character--it's hard to recognize this film as any kind of direct representation of a story as we usually see it. But it does evoke emotions and sensory experiences, it does give an impression of this family, these people, this time and place--times and places--and I think that can all add up to a satisfying--or more, really transporting--aesthetic and narrative and cinematic experience for viewers who are able to meet it on its own terms.
So I guess this is my uneasiness with saying the film is bad because I didn't like it, and because it was something I couldn't connect with as a movie and most people can't or don't or won't: it's perilously close to the way some people are inclined to dismiss abstract art--which I love--as something they or their kid could do. Obviously there's a lot of technical skill and artistry to this movie; obviously it should not be judged by the standards of linear narrative films because that's not what it's doing. I'm still not totally clear on what it was doing, or trying to do, but there are a fair number of people who connected with it and who thought it was doing what it was doing really well. So I'm willing to accept that there's a bunch of there there that just wasn't accessible to me.
That said: seriously I am never getting those two and a half hours of my life back. I seriously think--which led to my idea of it being an abstract film--that I would best be able to appreciate this film if it were the thing playing on a loop in that little room in the modern art wing at the Art Institute of Chicago, and people could sort of wander in and out at will and you could faintly hear the music--and occasional dialogue--from the nearby rooms, drawing you in. That's what this film was to me: a piece of modern art. And two and a half hours stuck staring at any given piece of modern art is maybe too much for me.
Also, much of the theater laughed when the CGI dinosaurs showed up because seriously what the fuck, CGI dinosaurs. And we definitely had the relieved-laughter-when-we-thought-it-was-over-followed-by-collective-groan-when-we-realized-it-wasn't crowd reaction to the almost-the-ending. Oh, and all the swooping camera angles and things randomly upside-down and so on were WAY MORE NAUSEATING from the fourth row than watching Hugo in 3D. I took dramamine about half an hour into it and still spent strategic portions of the film with my eyes closed and a hand over them, looking up only when Iulia nudged me or someone nearby whispered, "What the fuck?"
So those are my thoughts on Tree of Life.
Also also, I'm trying to remember if I have seen something with whispered voiceover that wasn't maddeningly twee. I feel like I have, but I can't place it. Thoughts?
3. The Help. Partly I loved this because, hey, steady camera shots and a linear narrative! It was a massive relief fifteen minutes after Tree of Life. But it was also an interesting story, and a lot more nuanced than I expected from the pithy criticisms I had heard of it and of the book. Still not at all sure I want to read the book, but I really liked the movie and I'm rooting like hell for Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer.
4. The Artist. I made a lot of heart-hands at the screen. I don't know whether I love Uggie or Jean Dujardin more, but it was fantastic and a really fun/heart-clenchy throwback. In a lot of ways it's kind of a grownup Hugo, a similar kind of homage to the early days of moviemaking and just gorgeously done.
5. The Descendants. I am kind of embarrassed by the extent to which my baseline knowledge of Hawaii is based on the five episodes of H50 I've seen and the significantly-more-than-five-episodes'-worth of fic I've read, but there you have it: this movie dealt with the sociopolitics of Hawaii in a way that, based on what I know from H50 fandom, felt really thoughtful and well-done. (Which is to say that my favorite line in the movie is Clooney's character, one of several cousins who have mutually inherited land through a great-great-grandmother who was a Hawaiian princess, saying, "We're haole as shit.")
Anyway: this was the first movie all day to make me cry, because I am a sucker for dads and daughters. It was a lot less goofy than the one promo I had seen led me to believe, but still definitely had its moments of loopy comedy, in a way that felt very real to the situation.
6. Midnight in Paris. I had never seen a Woody Allen movie before, and I feel like I picked the right one for me to start with. Also, I knew nothing about the premise, which made for a really fun surprise. So I'm going along for twenty minutes or so with what looks like your basic neurotic-writer-in-Paris-with-fiancee-and-in-laws rom-com-ish thing, and then Gil's sitting alone in Paris at midnight, having gotten totally lost, and up pulls a classic--1920s-era--car, and Gil climbs in and the people in the car are all dressed in Twenties style, and take him to a party where everyone is dressed in Twenties style, and he promptly gets introduced to Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald (&Tom Hiddleston;) and I got to realize, right along with Gil, that he had in fact been transported into the Twenties, and it was awesome.
And then there was HEMINGWAY. And GERTRUDE STEIN. AND DALI!
AND THEN FOR LIKE FIFTEEN SECONDS THERE WAS T. S. ELIOT!
(One of the really fun things about watching this in a packed theater was that after the first few, every time a new historical figure was introduced you would hear a handful of people cheer for that character. I definitely cheered for Eliot.)
Sometime between Dali and Eliot, I think, I turned to Iulia and whispered everything is beautiful and nothing hurts, because, seriously, the whole thing is just so delightful. ♥
So: I kind of have a movie-watching hangover, or possibly just the tireds from not getting in until 2:30 last night, but I am looking forward to the Oscars more than I can ever remember doing. I'm invested! I have opinions about stuff! It is totally possible that I will fall asleep at nine o'clock and miss a lot of it!
And despite my determination to critique thoughtfully, I am still going to be irritated if Tree of Life wins, even for Cinematography, because that was seriously a lot of time spent wanting to escape the theater and I will hold a grudge if I want to.
iulia's birthday earlier this month, I got her tickets to the marathon version of AMC's Best Picture Showcase (they run all nine Best Picture nominees inside of twenty-four hours), which was this weekend. Because we are old--and because Iulia is never, ever, ever allowed to see War Horse and we'd already seen Moneyball and weren't about to skip two movies and somehow still stay up until six AM to see Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close--we merely watched six movies in a row yesterday and called it a night. Personal highlight: there was trivia between movies, and I managed to win a Girl with the Dragon Tattoo knit hat for knowing who Alan Smithee is. \o/ I'm pretty sure I owe my ability to pop that answer out on command entirely to recently watching a lot of QI, so. Thanks, Stephen Fry.
Things learned for next time:
1) Get there early. Really early. The fourth row is not where you want to be stuck all day, and you will in fact be staying in the same seats pretty much all day. Although after the first two movies were over we got kind of Stockholmed into thinking those seats were just fine.
2) Maybe bring like a pillow and/or an eyemask to help you with any decisions to give up on a movie and go to sleep. Tree of Life, I'm looking at you. Trying not to, but looking at you anyway. Dammit.
3) Smuggle in some kind of snacks that are not movie theater food. Possibly because we are too old for this shit, after about ten or twelve hours of nothing but movie theater food we were both feeling pretty ill and longing for fruit like sailors coming down with scurvy.
4) You can in fact have faith in your fellow moviegoers. There's a very communal atmosphere to the whole thing: you're all in it together for the entire today. No one poached a seat that was marked with so much as a drink left in the cupholder, and it was a lot of fun discussing movies with random people around me. (Or bitching about them. Still looking at you, Tree of Life.)
Thoughts about movies, in the order we saw them:
1. Hugo. Awww, Hugo. ♥ We'd seen the movie before and I liked it but was by no means eager to see it again ASAP, so I was kind of expecting to be bored. But in fact it was still lovely and charming and enchanting and totally drew me in. 3D effects are way more "whoa that's going to hit me" from the fourth row, but I also got shadows/halos/doubling in a lot of places, so: those seats were not optimal.
2. Tree of Life. I did not enjoy this movie.
So, tangent that probably has a lot to do with my compulsion to say something about Tree of Life other than that it's two and a half hours of my life that I'm never getting back: Saturday morning, before leaving for the showcase, I finished reading C. S. Lewis's Studies in Words, which is partly just an interesting etymological case study of some words in English whose meanings have evolved significantly over time, and which can trip up a reader who imposes a modern meaning on an older usage. But it's also a bit of a jeremiad against "verbicide", by which he means, in large part, the sort of watering-down process that makes "awful" and "awesome" mean "bad" and "good" instead of "awe-inspiring". This turns at the end into a discussion of the language used in criticism and thus criticism itself:
If we honestly believe a work to be very bad we cannot help hating it. The function of criticism, however, is 'to get ourselves out of the way and let humanity decide'; not to discharge our hatred but to expose the grounds for it; not to vilify faults but to diagnose and exhibit them.
So: I feel really incapable of dismissing Tree of Life as bad. I hated it; a lot of people I watched it with hated it; I can understand why people hate it. It's described in the showcase program book as the "impressionistic story of a Midwestern family", and, just to get this out of the way, a) They're in Waco and I'm pretty certain no one inside or outside Texas considers it part of the Midwest, but more importantly, b) I think, if you want to call it a story at all, it's closer to being abstract than impressionistic.
I mean, impressionists give a visual impression that is not photo-realistic or strictly representational, but by and large the viewer still recognizes the thing they're portraying as a visual representation of the thing they're representing. In the absence of any kind of linear narrative, or detectable plot structure, or detectable focus--in the absence, for long portions of the movie, of characters, and for other long portions of the movie the absence of characters who could be firmly identified from one change of scene to the next as the same character--it's hard to recognize this film as any kind of direct representation of a story as we usually see it. But it does evoke emotions and sensory experiences, it does give an impression of this family, these people, this time and place--times and places--and I think that can all add up to a satisfying--or more, really transporting--aesthetic and narrative and cinematic experience for viewers who are able to meet it on its own terms.
So I guess this is my uneasiness with saying the film is bad because I didn't like it, and because it was something I couldn't connect with as a movie and most people can't or don't or won't: it's perilously close to the way some people are inclined to dismiss abstract art--which I love--as something they or their kid could do. Obviously there's a lot of technical skill and artistry to this movie; obviously it should not be judged by the standards of linear narrative films because that's not what it's doing. I'm still not totally clear on what it was doing, or trying to do, but there are a fair number of people who connected with it and who thought it was doing what it was doing really well. So I'm willing to accept that there's a bunch of there there that just wasn't accessible to me.
That said: seriously I am never getting those two and a half hours of my life back. I seriously think--which led to my idea of it being an abstract film--that I would best be able to appreciate this film if it were the thing playing on a loop in that little room in the modern art wing at the Art Institute of Chicago, and people could sort of wander in and out at will and you could faintly hear the music--and occasional dialogue--from the nearby rooms, drawing you in. That's what this film was to me: a piece of modern art. And two and a half hours stuck staring at any given piece of modern art is maybe too much for me.
Also, much of the theater laughed when the CGI dinosaurs showed up because seriously what the fuck, CGI dinosaurs. And we definitely had the relieved-laughter-when-we-thought-it-was-over-followed-by-collective-groan-when-we-realized-it-wasn't crowd reaction to the almost-the-ending. Oh, and all the swooping camera angles and things randomly upside-down and so on were WAY MORE NAUSEATING from the fourth row than watching Hugo in 3D. I took dramamine about half an hour into it and still spent strategic portions of the film with my eyes closed and a hand over them, looking up only when Iulia nudged me or someone nearby whispered, "What the fuck?"
So those are my thoughts on Tree of Life.
Also also, I'm trying to remember if I have seen something with whispered voiceover that wasn't maddeningly twee. I feel like I have, but I can't place it. Thoughts?
3. The Help. Partly I loved this because, hey, steady camera shots and a linear narrative! It was a massive relief fifteen minutes after Tree of Life. But it was also an interesting story, and a lot more nuanced than I expected from the pithy criticisms I had heard of it and of the book. Still not at all sure I want to read the book, but I really liked the movie and I'm rooting like hell for Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer.
4. The Artist. I made a lot of heart-hands at the screen. I don't know whether I love Uggie or Jean Dujardin more, but it was fantastic and a really fun/heart-clenchy throwback. In a lot of ways it's kind of a grownup Hugo, a similar kind of homage to the early days of moviemaking and just gorgeously done.
5. The Descendants. I am kind of embarrassed by the extent to which my baseline knowledge of Hawaii is based on the five episodes of H50 I've seen and the significantly-more-than-five-episodes'-worth of fic I've read, but there you have it: this movie dealt with the sociopolitics of Hawaii in a way that, based on what I know from H50 fandom, felt really thoughtful and well-done. (Which is to say that my favorite line in the movie is Clooney's character, one of several cousins who have mutually inherited land through a great-great-grandmother who was a Hawaiian princess, saying, "We're haole as shit.")
Anyway: this was the first movie all day to make me cry, because I am a sucker for dads and daughters. It was a lot less goofy than the one promo I had seen led me to believe, but still definitely had its moments of loopy comedy, in a way that felt very real to the situation.
6. Midnight in Paris. I had never seen a Woody Allen movie before, and I feel like I picked the right one for me to start with. Also, I knew nothing about the premise, which made for a really fun surprise. So I'm going along for twenty minutes or so with what looks like your basic neurotic-writer-in-Paris-with-fiancee-and-in-laws rom-com-ish thing, and then Gil's sitting alone in Paris at midnight, having gotten totally lost, and up pulls a classic--1920s-era--car, and Gil climbs in and the people in the car are all dressed in Twenties style, and take him to a party where everyone is dressed in Twenties style, and he promptly gets introduced to Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald (&Tom Hiddleston;) and I got to realize, right along with Gil, that he had in fact been transported into the Twenties, and it was awesome.
And then there was HEMINGWAY. And GERTRUDE STEIN. AND DALI!
AND THEN FOR LIKE FIFTEEN SECONDS THERE WAS T. S. ELIOT!
(One of the really fun things about watching this in a packed theater was that after the first few, every time a new historical figure was introduced you would hear a handful of people cheer for that character. I definitely cheered for Eliot.)
Sometime between Dali and Eliot, I think, I turned to Iulia and whispered everything is beautiful and nothing hurts, because, seriously, the whole thing is just so delightful. ♥
So: I kind of have a movie-watching hangover, or possibly just the tireds from not getting in until 2:30 last night, but I am looking forward to the Oscars more than I can ever remember doing. I'm invested! I have opinions about stuff! It is totally possible that I will fall asleep at nine o'clock and miss a lot of it!
And despite my determination to critique thoughtfully, I am still going to be irritated if Tree of Life wins, even for Cinematography, because that was seriously a lot of time spent wanting to escape the theater and I will hold a grudge if I want to.
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(One of the really fun things about watching this in a packed theater was that after the first few, every time a new historical figure was introduced you would hear a handful of people cheer for that character. I definitely cheered for Eliot.)
I love it!
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I haven't seen one since Celebrity, and that was just because of Kenneth Branagh, mostly because I absolutely hated Annie Hall.
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Getting old
Love this. I went on a road trip yesterday and understand this sentiment exactly.
Re: Getting old