Talk About Movies: Part 4
Somehow threads merged, so here's part 4 of our ongoing movie discussion.
Ricky Gervais highlights the website, Does the Dog Die, in his recent Netflix special. Viewers ask about a number of triggers in films. Currently, 186 triggers are covered on the site. You can add your own.
I would add:
Do English professors maintain a sense of decorum during department meetings?
Does anyone say "This is more of a statement than a question."
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I saw a bit in a recent video that I can’t remember but it was about sex scenes in films. That’s a worthwhile debatable topic, but someone actually stated…. ahem…. “But did the characters themselves consent to being filmed having sex…”
Really??
Watched Solaris, Soderbergh's, again tonight.
Both this version and Tarkovsky's original are great films. Sure, films can, and often should, be pure entertainment, but they can also force us to ask the sorts of questions we often don't pose to ourselves. What is memory? How do we apprehend time? How do we face our own mortality (in one scene in the film Clooney's character says we are not really different from sharks, but a dinner guest says we are the only creatures aware of our own mortality)?
I only think of regret... things unsaid, promises unkempt and joys unrealized.
It is only close to death that I truly feel alive.
For some reason we were discussing Nic Cage films, and then Con Air (1997) came up as a Jeopardy! question this week so we felt obliged to watch.
My god. I don't remember it being like this, but what an editing nightmare. I think I got epilepsy from the amount of screen changes. It was unlike anything I could think of seeing in recent memory.
ban imo
It's been proven... Montages can trigger epileptic events.
Happy birthday to your wife, John. May her memory give you peace.
Also, Solaris is an amazing film.
The Zone Of Interest, Johnathan Glazer.
Glazer is one of those filmmakers who disappears for year and then shows up with a stunning masterpiece.
The Zone Of Interest is not an entertainment. It is a piece of art with a capital A. It is not meant to be enjoyed, but to be thought over and felt and maybe make us think about our capacity to lie to ourselves and be monsters.
It is about the Kommandant of Auschwitz concentration camp during WWII, and his family of 6 living next door, on the other side of the wall, in a beautiful, pastoral garden and comfortable home. They swim in the river, tend their huge gardens, the kids go to school, they have friends over, and live a normal, loving life.
And feet away, Jews are being incinerated by the thousands every day.
The movie is not a standard narrative. We just see the family go about their daily lives, and their Jewish house maids and gardeners - the lucky Jews - cater to them as servants. The Kommandant is doing his best to impress Himmler and Hitler and his other superiors, by killing as many people as they can. His wife gets a daily package of "recovered" possessions from the camps, like a mink coat, and various Knick-knacks. Stolen from now dead Jews. She also casually threatens her servants with what her husband can do to them when she is in a bad mood.
What makes this movie brilliant, and possibly the best movie of the past 5 years, is that we are never shown the horror just over the wall. We sometimes catch a glimpse of the chimney belching it's horrific aftermath and the glow of the evil fires. Instead, we hear - just barely - screams and gunshots and the ever-present industrial groaning of the ovens, always in the background but never stopping.
I was shook after watching...especially the ending. Glazer cuts to the present day, showing Auschwitz now and the remnants of suitcases and shoes of thousands of victims behind glass in the now-museum, as workers clean and polish the place.
The Zone Of Interest is about the banality of evil to its logical conclusion. How true horror can be happening only feet away and yet be ignored by those doing the evil.
This is a masterwork of filmmaking and a movie I never want to see again.
The Zone Of Interest, Johnathan Glazer.
Glazer is one of those filmmakers who disappears for year and then shows up with a stunning masterpiece.
The Zone Of Interest is not an entertainment. It is a piece of art with a capital A. It is not meant to be enjoyed, but to be thought over and felt and maybe make us think about our capacity to lie to ourselves and be monsters.
It is about the Kommandant of Auschwitz concentration camp during WWII, and his family of 6 living next door, on the other side
cosign on everything Dominic wrote.
last month when I reviewed it here as well. I think it's a movie that should be showed to every high school senior
saw Zone Of Interest today , and it's a disturbing a film as you will ever process.
How , us as humans are able to compartmentalize and dehumanize from those different from us beyong saddening.
This movie should be watched by everyone so they too can maybe see how cold and cruel and zero empathy we could be driven to
if we believe the narrative and how something that could be totally evil, be justified and accepted with.
this wasnt the best movie by far, but it should be a movie watched by all.
also don't want to watch it again.
Dom,
I just came back from seeing it. I agree with your review, and if I hadn't gone alone, I would have been stunned into silence, which I was anyway.
That ending, though, I think with Hoss retching, it's as if he's looking into the future the way the corridor in the Holocaust museum resembles the hallway he stands in.
I had to look up how the negative imagery shots were done. I figured it was just using a negative image, but Glazer used a special camera to shoot it and upscaled the footage to 4K.
We know that sound is important, but this film makes you feel just how important it is, making the viewer aware just what is happening out of sight, a sound that the Hoss family doesn't even register.
I need to think about the effect the film had on me more, the way Glazer keeps the camera away from the characters. The only closeups are of flowers.
Perhaps nothing in the film conveys the banality of evil more than Mrs Hoss trying on the fur coat and applying the lipstick.
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cosign on everything Dominic wrote.
last month when I reviewed it here as well. I think it's a movie that should be showed to every high school senior
For a number of years now, I have been showing Resnais's Night and Fog to my classes. Most of my students are just out of high school. The film ends with these words:
"We survey these ruins with a heartfelt gaze, certain the old monster lies crushed beneath the rubble. We pretend to regain hope as the image recedes, as though we’ve been cured of the plague of the camps. We pretend it was all confined to one country, one point in time. We turn a blind eye to what surrounds us, and a deaf ear to the never-ending cries . . .”
The new executioners look just like us.
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It's amazing that a movie like that would be nominated for best picture at the Oscars...they don't usually go for difficult art films, you know?
Dom,
I just came back from seeing it. I agree with your review, and if I hadn't gone alone, I would have been stunned into silence, which I was anyway.
That ending, though, I think with Hoss retching, it's as if he's looking into the future the way the corridor in the Holocaust museum resembles the hallway he stands in.
I had to look up how the negative imagery shots were done. I figured it was just using a negative image, but Glazer used a special camera to shoot it and upscaled the footage to 4K
What got me was the scene with the little boy in his room playing with his army men, and he hears his father outside telling a soldier to drown another child in the river because he was fighting with another child over an apple.
Con Air clearly a monument to film-making.
After the harrowing The Zone Of Interest, I needed a holocaust film that would make me feel better about being a human, so tonight I watched One Life, the story of Sir Nicholas Winton.
Winton was an English stockbroker in 1938 who went to Prague for a week to see if he could help with the desperate Czech refugee crisis from the Eastern part of the country due to Hitler's invasion.. He ended up creating a British children's refugee organization that saved 660~ mostly Jewish children from almost certain death in the camps.
You may have seen the famous clip from the English show, That's Life, that surprises Winton years later with some of the now-grown children he saved. Anthony Hopkins plays the elder Winton while Johnny Flynn plays the younger one. Leno Olin and Johnathan Price also star.
It is estimated that there are over 6000 people alive today due directly to Winton's heroic effort. He helped when he didn't have to, simply because he couldn't bear not to help.
Broken YouTube LinkHas anyone seen El Conde, a Chilean film that is a satire that portrays dictator Augusto Pinochet as a 250-year-old vampire seeking death. It's nominated for Best Cinematography at the Oscars. I think it's on Netflix.
Dune: Part 2
No spoilers... shen you see it, it is going be what you expect.
No disappointments here.
6:15pm Friday night for Dune 2.
Rewatched part 1 this weekend, first time since seeing in theatres. Honestly it was even better than I remembered. Pretty excited for Friday.
Let me know why the Emperor of the known universe has a new york accent...
After the harrowing The Zone Of Interest, I needed a holocaust film that would make me feel better about being a human, so tonight I watched One Life, the story of Sir Nicholas Winton.
Winton was an English stockbroker in 1938 who went to Prague for a week to see if he could help with the desperate Czech refugee crisis from the Eastern part of the country due to Hitler's invasion.. He ended up creating a British children's refugee organization that saved 660~ mostly Jewish children from almost c
also need this,, i looked in las vegas theaters and it wont show til mid march , are you in nyc or la or you watched at home?
watched dune 1 a couple weeks ago on imax, and while not a fan of scifi, it was awesome,(1st time watched it)
so loking forward for dune 2 in imax this thursday .
Well then, your gonna love part 2... it's part one on steroids.
Fugedabout it!
