Films Recently Watched

[cwmbrancity]

how profound

[zaphod]

i wish i was capable of love

[cruising for burgers]

By the way, You Were Never Really Here is amazing. Best movie I’ve seen all year

have yet to see a better depiction of PTSD & the story is tone perfect, best film seen for a long while, zero fat on it, tight & cohesive, came out of the cinema blinking in a frazzled mood

also saw "you were never really here" with two of pta's collaborators. it was trash.

from imdb:

If you thought this was a film about a disturbed loner avenging an innocent, you got snookered. 

 

The only way to understand YWNRH is through a Freudian lens. 

 

The theme of this film is not father-daughter incest as it appears, but rather mother-son incest. 

 

Joe has an incestuous relationship with his mother. "Stay with me a little longer," she says when he puts her to bed. In the next scene, she is trying to cajole him into coming into the bathroom where she is naked. The multiple references to PSYCHO are not a coincidence: this too is the story of a man transformed into a serial murderer by his obscene mother. 

 

The story proper is nothing is a paranoid delusion: hence the title of the film and the mysterious "invisibility" of the main character.

 

The true story: Joe, as a child, is dragged into an incestuous relationship by his mother. His father, whose job ought to be to prevent this regressive fusion, does not have the authority to separate them. He is too violent, too weak, or too absent: we never find out. All we ever see of him is a hand holding a hammer. This scene must be understood as a metaphor. Father discovers their relationship and explodes; as he rages impotently with his hammer, mother and son exchange a complicit glance under the bed. Translation of the mother's wink: "He's impotent. You're still MINE." On mother's credenza is a photo of her as a young and beautiful woman and a photo of her son. Father has been eliminated from the picture. 

 

Joe rescues abused girls. This is a fantasy. No abused girl ever existed, only an abused boy. Joe invents the story of a girl abused by her father as a displacement of the true abuse: a boy by his mother. 

 

What actually happens in the movie, and what is fantasy? What actually happens is very simple. Joe murders his mother. Joe commits suicide. Perhaps the homosexual encounter in the sauna and the drugs are true. Everything else is a delusion that he creates to escape from the horror of the truth. In Joe's fantasy, he is a powerful man and not a victim. He has a benevolent father figure (McCleary). He makes ample use of the hammer which appears to be the only trace of a paternal legacy. The Nina character is how Joe sees his mother: as a beautiful, innocent, prohibited object of desire. Joe's delusion is simultaneously an attempt to understand the truth and an attempt to flee the truth. David Lynch uses this technique more explicitly in LOST HIGHWAY, MULHOLLAND DRIVE, and TWIN PEAKS. It is very effective on film and Lynne Ramsay is right to exploit it. In Joe's delusion, the father (represented by the two- dimensional Votto and Williams characters) takes "illegal" possession of his daughter. In reality, this is how the young Joe perceives his father's possession of his mother: as an unbearable crime that must be punished. Did Joe murder his own father? It is possible. Note that in all of Joe's traumatic flashbacks, women are being murdered, not men. These flashbacks are not real. They are irruptions of Joe's deepest fantasy: murder his mother. He never went to Iraq.

 

One day, like Ed Kemper, Joe finally kills his mother. He is the one who shot her in the head. To exculpate himself, he flees into an unbelievable political conspiracy fantasy in which all symbolic fathers are pedophile criminals. Why is Joe so protective of his mother's privacy? Because he doesn't want anyone to find out what is going on between them. 

 

I wasn't sure the director understood her own story until the moment she replaced Joe's sinking mother with Nina. Here she could not be clearer: Nina is just a fantasy screen for Mother. 

 

In reality, Joe really does shoot himself in the diner. The fantasy of a happy future with Nina is just a screen. 

 

I have read Jonathan Ames before and the theme of maternal incest is often implied (his fascination for transsexuals is further proof of an Oedipal thematic). 

 

Good movie.

 

Edited April 10, 2018 by THIS IS MICHAEL JACKSON

[tec]

Holy cock sucking Christ, he liked a film!

[eugene]

TIMJ, you could build such silly constructs on top of literally everything, pretty much regardless of the content of the film. i remember someone, somewhere made an elaborate cultural critique out of jurassic world for example. i don't believe that concealing and deliberately making things more difficult to untangle is something directors actually strive for, as a proof of some sophistication or something.  viewers arguing with the director about what had actually happened in their film ("NO! he did actually kill himself!) just seems really stupid to me

[cruising for burgers]

yeah i think that's a way far fetched analysis of the movie but at the same time it is at least an explanation for such an improbable plot... i really liked the movie, it really got me on its mood through all the exceptionally well crafted cinema techniques it used, but at the same time i felt that the plot was a bit unbelievable and that's why i think an "it was all in his head" interpretation is frankly quite plausible...

Edited April 10, 2018 by THIS IS MICHAEL JACKSON

[olo]

Finally got around to watching The Force Awakens. 

 

It should have never been woke. 

Edited April 10, 2018 by olo

[pcock]

TIMJ, you could build such silly constructs on top of literally everything, pretty much regardless of the content of the film. i remember someone, somewhere made an elaborate cultural critique out of jurassic world for example. i don't believe that concealing and deliberately making things more difficult to untangle is something directors actually strive for, as a proof of some sophistication or something.  viewers arguing with the director about what had actually happened in their film ("NO! he did actually kill himself!) just seems really stupid to me

and yet, people still respect Ulysses. 

[caze]

Finally watched Wiener Dog. I meant to see it in the cinema when it came out and didn't get around to it. Had it dloaded since then and forgot about it.

Had a really shitty and depressing day and remembered I had it. A Solondz movie always cheers me up, probably in the most unhealthy way.

Loved it. I see he has a new one out this year, can't wait.

Gonna rewatch Happiness tonight for the 900th time.

[caze]

Finally watched Wiener Dog. I meant to see it in the cinema when it came out and didn't get around to it. Had it dloaded since then and forgot about it.

Had a really shitty and depressing day and remembered I had it. A Solondz movie always cheers me up, probably in the most unhealthy way.

Loved it. I see he has a new one out this year, can't wait.

Gonna rewatch Happiness tonight for the 900th time.

Just watched this, really liked it too. His best in a while I think, lots of slow build up uncomfortableness followed by the relief of a genuine lol. The first scene with prelude to the afternoon of a swan was so beautifully shot, then following that up with repeating the theme with a long tracking shot of diarrhea was genius. Many more uncomfortable laughs too, bomb vest bit was great too.

[caze]

* Clair de lune

[Nebraska]

 

a few chuckles here and there but really it's (again) an okay skit extended to what felt like 2 hours.

 

basically rene (schumer) is an overweight forgotten girl who works in some dumpster of an office  for a company full of super hot chicks. working in the main office is her dream come true. so she goes to the gym and on her first day knocks her head and suddenly she thinks she's "beautiful" (thin) and suddenly she's extremely confident. 

 

this rips off both BIG and shallow hal. there's also a guy that looks frighteningly similar to dave chappelle and plays a roll with two other dudes that harkened to the film half baked

 

i don't know about this one. i think schumer is on damage control but the damage might be irreparable at this point. 

[dr lopez]

Sounds great

[Silent Member]

But she's not fat? How does this work?

[usagi]

it doesn't work because she's also not funny.

[Silent Member]

Sounds great

[Nebraska]

^^^ it doesn't. i guess that's the joke. the film abandons that pretty quickly and just makes it a gag for amy to use but the real message here becomes "if you're a basic bitch i.e. everyday woman and not a super model, you can be hot too. you just need to believe in it because nobody else will anyway"

 

have to say i left the theater feeling pretty so...

[usagi]

but did you start making jokes about how your fanny smells and you're a huge slag and you can "catch a dick anytime" though it doesn't have anything to do with your money or fame?

[Nebraska]

^^ was thinking of doing that tonight. 

 

Edited April 12, 2018 by Nebraska

[dr lopez]

it doesn't work because she's also not funny.

 

she was funny before she embraced woke shaming culture etc and was just mean.

[caze]

Liam Neeson on a Train - "I'm 60 years old!"

[milkface]

Studied La Haine (1995) in school 2 years ago, brilliant French film.

 

Edited April 12, 2018 by milkface

[Silent Member]

It's decent.

[tec]

mother! - I'm so pleased a film like this can still get made. I think I enjoyed it but I need time to process it.

[cwmbrancity]

it reminded me of Synecdoche New York