I was very distressed when I was looking for a shitty movie to zone out on that Invisible Man was actually ... good. Weird. Anyway, appreciate the concern, but there's lots of art — books, paintings, spicy memes, music — being made by and about and starting non-white men that is officially Definitely Art and isn't like, MCU market pandering. We got this. :)
Totally agree that a lot of the really engaging horror movies tap into real world anxieties, from The Thing to Night of the Living Dead to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer tv series. And I also totally agree that it takes something away when the movie explains the premise.
Promising Young Woman starred Carey Mulligan and started off promisingly enough but soon was crushed by the weight of The Message!
It made me nostalgic for the movies of the 70s that were unafraid to end on a bleak note, because, as adults, we could take it and make our own minds up. Now, the hero/heroine always has to triumph, which as we all know, very rarely happens.
Your comment reminded me of my reaction to Skyfall, and how it would have been so much better if it ended five minutes sooner, in the burning church with Bond cradling M's body. The perfect ending for a story about hubris and how bad (if well-intentioned) choices can come back to haunt you.
Instead it keeps going and we're supposed to think that Bond is some sort of badass.
"I look forward to a correction for this stuff in the coming years, where getting more films by women and filmmakers of color stops being a novelty and people are more comfortable letting the stories tell the tale, in and of and for themselves."
Same, man. Piggybacking off yesterday's post, there's a lot of Good White Men in Film Twitter world as well who are just insufferable with their loud, scoldy social justice takes. They're so awful that they can turn you off of an otherwise good movie. Prominent examples include MovieBob, David Ehrlich, and FilmCritHULK, but they're far from alone.
I look forward to the day when those guys chill the fuck out, though it might take a few years.
Not to be too dramatic, but it seems like film criticism has been dead for awhile. Too much groupthink. I can't imagine anyone criticizing Black Panther or Crazy Rich Asians, its just not worth the professional cost. I can remember losing respect for A.O. Scott when I read his glowing review for Wonder Woman. Super hero films aren't really my bag, but even my already low expectations didn't prepare me for how dreadful the film actually was. I understand it's desirable to have all minority casts and female superheroes, and proud we are of all of them. But it's patronizing to both the audience and artist to grade them on some social justice curve.
It reminds me of when right thinking publications like New York magazine promote "Black owned" businesses. Like aww, isn't that cute (pats on head), they started a business selling cookies even though they're black. We hear you, and we're doing the work; sorry about George Floyd, but we'll post a link to your Etsy!
Yeah the movie criticism scene has suffered from all the same shit other media and journalism has. And as a result I've been slowly backing away from it. I can enjoy the movies without consuming the thinkpieces. It's better that way.
He went woke after Trump won. Painfully, excruciatingly woke. Nowadays he can't even write about a movie or show he really likes without going on a grievance-filled screed. Its all so over-the-top and Tumblr esque.
Are we talking about the Marvel hero/murderer The Hulk or someone else? Because I searched for "woke hulk" and just got ignorant people who thought that She-Hulk was a woke invention and not just Marvel Comics doubling down on dumb to pad their wallets.
He wrote the whole thing in character, in all caps. He's incapable of sincere feeling that isn't expressed through a pop-culture lens, it's the framework for his understanding of the universe. Even in moments of intense, apparently personal feeling, he's got the mask up. I remember thinking at the time it's like those pick up artists who name themselves stuff like Mystery and have to put on a persona to talk to women because when they are what they think of as their true self they can't handle intimacy. It's deeply sad.
This one isn't so bad from my perspective. Just seems like a guy grieving. Writing in all caps and third person was his gimmick for years, and he dropped that gimmick immediately following Trump's election.
His post-2016 stuff is easier to read, but man oh man I almost wish it wasn't. It's utterly deranged. We're talking Noah Berlatsky territory.
Your fascination with this guy reminds me of my own feelings towards Aaron Rupar. That guy is singularly responsible for me blocking vox.com from my Google News feed. He apparently doesn't work for them anymore, but the damage is done. I groan every time one of his troll-tweets makes it into the news. He contributes nothing and is akin to something like an anti-liberal, or anti-thinker.
Yeah I feel ya. It's not healthy. I'm trying my hardest to get away from that crowd he represents.
I've seen bits and pieces of Rupar's uh....work. I remember him scolding people at a Notre Dame football game celebrating a win during the pandemic. What a maroon.
I think it's a snapshot of a moment when he simply can't be real, despite obviously wanting to and having something real to say, and all the goodwill in the world from people ready to hear it. I remember disliking him before that for the gimmick and the bad movie opinions but this essay really crystallized something for me about people who use product love as a prosthetic identity. It's something I've come back to again and again in my head as people started using marvel movies in political arguments, every girl on tinder started mentioning their Hogwarts house and you started seeing the phrase 'cheeto voldemort' thrown around sincerely by people with a pathological attachment to their childhood toys who were forced to grapple with actual real world issues and politics. They can't do it so they retreat to a world where opinions are easily digested facts, and all the bad guys are ugly.
I remember a comment an activist made about 'gamergate,' that 2014 meltdown that has served as a model for internet media types melting down in the decade since. he said something like 'I'm out here fighting for the 15 dollar minimum wage, with guys literally in my face threatening me. Tomorrow I'll be going to a rally to end the deportation of illegal immigrant factory workers, and more guys will be in my face threatening me. But I'm used to it. For these gamergate types, they've been threatened for the first time, and it's literally the end of the world, because nothing like this has EVER HAPPENED TO THEM. It's transformative.'
That's a perfect description of Film Critic Hulk, like a lot of the extremely online crowd. I'm sure I can find an example of him melting down about gamergate, now that I think about it. They're people who have been traumatized in large part because they were so sheltered before, in their land of play and sanitized disney morality.
Ugh Gamergate. Some people still won't shut up about that. They're all like "Gamergate more than anything else led to January 6" and I'm like oh come the fuck on.
Parasite was a movie that explicitly said its thesis at the dinner scene: the rich people are nice because they can afford to be nice, and they do nothing wrong but simply through the extreme wealth and power disparity and the total dependence of one family on another, the poor family ends up degraded and destroyed. The sin of the poor is dreaming of having more and being unworthy; the sin of the rich is not even SEEING the poor family as truly human for one single solitary minute.
The best interpretation of Parasite is that the poor family aren't actually poor. They're precariously middle class with aspirations of being wealthy. They envy what the rich family has but have come to believe that it is out of their reach by any normal means.
I read a great review, which I think I got from a link in astralcodexten, which posited that, based on South Korean cultural expectations, the ‘parasite’ specifically refers to the dad, because he never fulfilled his societal expectation of providing for and launching his children. Which I thought was an interesting perspective.
My reading of it was that it was the daughter who was the serious con artist. She pushes the family into way more than they’d otherwise have done. But perhaps from a SK perspective it’s also a father’s responsibility not to have his daughter go off the rails!
I can't figure out how to find it, I'm afraid! It wasn't some name person on a big-brand site and searching ASX for "parasite" at the moment to jog my memory (and for all I know it might have been some other site I was reading anyway) just brings up a whole bunch of stuff about Ivermectin...
Good luck on the surgery! I would nominate Judas and the Black messiah as another example bad art that got good reviews due to representational concerns. I’d still rather watch Selma again, not necessarily for the politics but because it’s just so much better made than Judas.
With zero expectations I might have enjoyed it, unfortunately I had already heard an interview with the director and read at least one glowing review so I hated it.
For sure---I don’t think anyone praises D’Angelo simply because of his obliquely Black liberationist politics, they praise him because he’s an utterly transcendent musical genius.
I rather liked Promising Young Woman even though I am usually allergic to films with an overbearing message. [From an earlier comment of mine:] The film was to my mind more subtle than the outward presentation and many viewers were unable to parse that Mulligan's character was both fighting for a righteous cause but was also bordering on deranged and committing deeply immoral acts. It seemed to me many of the reviewers were unable to view the acts in the film as morally complex, instead sitting at either "she's a monster and woman deserve better heroines" or "I adored watching this righteous quest; you go girl!" To my mind, the film is about how the pernicious poison of sexual assault blackens and ruins all that it touches; such acts destroy the lives of everyone in the vicinity, leaving only twisted rage and grief. In that respect the film is genius.
I know a few people who have become singualrly defined by a traumatic event in their past. Promising Young Woman captures with uncanny accuracy how those people became unanchored from the world and people who care about them, slowly poisoning themselves yet further in a doomed effort to get justice.
I want to believe you're right and this was the intent of the filmmakers, but I think you're interpolating in themes that they were nowhere near nuanced enough to deliberately insert.
That could be but I really do think that was the intent. The film takes the time to have multiple characters tell Mulligan that they are worried about her and encourage her to move on with her life, both her own parents and the mother of her decesed friend. The scenes where she kidnaps the daughter of the dean and then prentends to the dean that she has left her underage daughter in the company of unsavory men are framed as the acts of a sinister and cruel person, and the film very deliberately invites us to imagine that Mulligan did indeed do something so dispicable. When Mulligan goes to confront the laywer who defended the rapist she is shocked when the lawyer begs for her forgivenss; the moment reality departs from her narrative of revenge she is dumbstruck and cannot properly process it. When she finally answers the calls of Alison Brie's character the film makes it clear that Mulligan, now in a healthier frame of mind and beginning to move on with her life, realizes that she did something wrong and she rather sheepishly assures Brie that she was not in fact assualted by a stranger while drunk. Of course, the film of her friend being raped is then provided to her and the righteous singular purpose of Mulligan's life reaserts itself.
To my mind the dichotomy is abundantly clear. I think people had trouble recognizing it because of when the film came out; it was (and still is) difficult to imagine someone would make a film about someone doing the wrong thing for the right reasons vis a vis sexual assault in 2021.
I think you're right about what the film was trying to say, but I also think it said it really badly. Like, the whole nice guy thing, the Ultimate Revenge at the end that doesn't even really make any sense, it's just a hot mess. And not in a 'look how damaged this person has been' kind of hot mess. More like "i don't write well but I sold a screenplay"
I haven't seen either, but your analysis of the two conveys an all-too-familiar art trope these day; namely, that the message should always be paramount to anything else...including the art. Besides the obvious error here (art quality should never really take a back seat to anything) it's also just plain exasperating.
I read recently that Oscar Wilde was a big proponent of something called aestheticism; the idea that art should exist for art's sake, and not be subservient to socio-political themes. While I both agree with him on principle, and would say that there's nothing inherently wrong with having your art be a reflection of said socio-political themes, I think modern artists would do the form much more genuine justice if they concentrated more on producing great art first, and sending a message second.
Anyone can call out social injustice, just read Twitter for 5 minutes. But only a great artist can do so both without you realizing it because the medium is so sublime, and in a form whose beauty will still be just as beautiful if you took away the message.
One thing to my own credit - I am fairly immune to how “politics” are injected into movies, television, etc. I can evaluate a program/movie without being sidetracked by those considerations. Acting, story, flow, suspense can pretty much be separate from “underlying messages” for me.
In fact, I do not look to filmmakers for political import or wisdom - I assume they generally will not be good at it.
So I enjoyed PYW because of the acting, fairly unique story, some compelling scenes, and the payoff. Certainly over the top in many ways, but for me it worked.
And that’s the bottom line - you don’t have to find the “messaging” to be artful to enjoy the film. There are lots of ways for a movie to be sophisticated/nuanced or to fail at same, but the “political messaging” alone is just one piece.
"the people who make those decisions think that movies by women or people of color are meant to be political first and foremost."
I am reminded of a report of marketing failure back in the early 80's, regarding 'cars for women'. Manufacturers (or perhaps car dealers) put a great deal of effort into painting select fancy models pink with lots of chrome, only to watch them sit on the lot. When making their own choices, women wanted excessively practical cars with extra safety features.
If women & 'minority' film makers have visions that are so different as to be valued for their unique flavor, it follows that those flavors may not be to the taste of a majority of film watchers.
I think Kathryn Bigelow's Hurt Locker is a shining example of what's possible for the future of art made by not-just-men.
Second, and this is incidental, this reminded me of something my mom told me about a friend back in the 80s: the woman's husband would tell her he was going out of town then he'd hide in the house and do things to scare her. YEESH. thankfully she successfully divorced him.
I remember a lot of sneering at Hurt Locker when it came out, but I think at that point I spent a lot of time with members of the US military, and many of them disliked the movie. I just watched it for the first time a couple of days ago and thought it was very good.
The behavior of that husband sounds horrific. One of those sorts of things you see in that creepy suspense movie that doesn't feel like it could happen in reality as you ask yourself "no one is really that depraved, are they?"
The Hurt Locker Hate was and remains real. I think it comes down to the military-civilian divide; it doesn’t matter how well done the cinematography and editing and acting and the so on so forth are if every single detail about everything is utterly, atrociously, willfully, disrespectfully wrong. For a film to purport to be a gritty, bleak glimpse at the reality of the Iraqi occupation from the American perspective, it sure as hell didn’t see the actual reality of the Iraqi occupation from the American perspective as being worth depicting.
The Hurt Locker is an extremely bad war film. Like, it's beautiful, the cinematography is great and the acting is fine and it's got emotions and stuff. But holy crap is it a dumb picture
I actually don’t remember the plot that well. It just jumped to mind as a film by a woman that was decidedly not A Woman’s Issues Film. Wanna refresh me?
It's been a while but Jeremy Renner plays a bomb disposal guy who is so bad at his job that he would have gone to prison for it. He does stuff like take souvenirs of stuff that realistically would have been turned in as evidence to help identify bomb makers, he takes off his gear at one point, he's cavalier with his own and others' lives in ways that are unrealistic, especially with everyone else sort of putting up with it. The movie sells him as this badass cowboy who is also a meticulous technician who has been PUSHED TO THE EDGE but in real terms he's just a guy who would get discharged really quickly for having zero discipline.
Also it got a lot of hype for being well-researched but there's some stuff that is egregiously technically wrong that I don't personally remember but actual military people notice. Oh and it had the regular CSI problem where these support guys are suddenly investigating and arresting people.
When it came out the whole military booed, essentially. People tried to spin that as misogyny but it wasn't, they just didn't like the inaccurate fantasy of their jobs. Being totally unrealistic is fine when a film is fun to watch but works worse when it's got some heavy-handed message about trauma.
Yeah I read a couple reviews along these lines. Funny, that kind of behavior WOULD get you fired or court-martialed or whatever, and would get you FLAYED in the media today if it was something that actually happened.
Yeah. There's a ton of examples of people being super irresponsible in wartime, you can get stories about it from pretty much any veteran, some kid picks up an unexploded mine and ends up blowing his ass off or something, or an asshole shoots in the air instead of a barrel of sand and ends up hitting a guy and going to jail. but the kind of stuff his character is doing isn't the same sort of thing at all, it's being bad at and irresponsible with his specific specialty, and is particularly bad because there are no consequences and in reality the military loves consequences.
Very male, very yt bona fides. *ominous music*
good luck me brother
I was very distressed when I was looking for a shitty movie to zone out on that Invisible Man was actually ... good. Weird. Anyway, appreciate the concern, but there's lots of art — books, paintings, spicy memes, music — being made by and about and starting non-white men that is officially Definitely Art and isn't like, MCU market pandering. We got this. :)
Memes are not art, sorry.
Good luck on the surgery.
Totally agree that a lot of the really engaging horror movies tap into real world anxieties, from The Thing to Night of the Living Dead to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer tv series. And I also totally agree that it takes something away when the movie explains the premise.
Promising Young Woman starred Carey Mulligan and started off promisingly enough but soon was crushed by the weight of The Message!
It made me nostalgic for the movies of the 70s that were unafraid to end on a bleak note, because, as adults, we could take it and make our own minds up. Now, the hero/heroine always has to triumph, which as we all know, very rarely happens.
Your comment reminded me of my reaction to Skyfall, and how it would have been so much better if it ended five minutes sooner, in the burning church with Bond cradling M's body. The perfect ending for a story about hubris and how bad (if well-intentioned) choices can come back to haunt you.
Instead it keeps going and we're supposed to think that Bond is some sort of badass.
"I look forward to a correction for this stuff in the coming years, where getting more films by women and filmmakers of color stops being a novelty and people are more comfortable letting the stories tell the tale, in and of and for themselves."
Same, man. Piggybacking off yesterday's post, there's a lot of Good White Men in Film Twitter world as well who are just insufferable with their loud, scoldy social justice takes. They're so awful that they can turn you off of an otherwise good movie. Prominent examples include MovieBob, David Ehrlich, and FilmCritHULK, but they're far from alone.
I look forward to the day when those guys chill the fuck out, though it might take a few years.
Not to be too dramatic, but it seems like film criticism has been dead for awhile. Too much groupthink. I can't imagine anyone criticizing Black Panther or Crazy Rich Asians, its just not worth the professional cost. I can remember losing respect for A.O. Scott when I read his glowing review for Wonder Woman. Super hero films aren't really my bag, but even my already low expectations didn't prepare me for how dreadful the film actually was. I understand it's desirable to have all minority casts and female superheroes, and proud we are of all of them. But it's patronizing to both the audience and artist to grade them on some social justice curve.
It reminds me of when right thinking publications like New York magazine promote "Black owned" businesses. Like aww, isn't that cute (pats on head), they started a business selling cookies even though they're black. We hear you, and we're doing the work; sorry about George Floyd, but we'll post a link to your Etsy!
Yeah the movie criticism scene has suffered from all the same shit other media and journalism has. And as a result I've been slowly backing away from it. I can enjoy the movies without consuming the thinkpieces. It's better that way.
I miss the days when HULK wasn't like that. He used to be one of my favorites.
Oh yeah. The poster child for Trump Derangement Syndrome. Post-2016, he immediately turned a corner and kept getting more and more unhinged.
What happened with the Hulk?
He went woke after Trump won. Painfully, excruciatingly woke. Nowadays he can't even write about a movie or show he really likes without going on a grievance-filled screed. Its all so over-the-top and Tumblr esque.
Are we talking about the Marvel hero/murderer The Hulk or someone else? Because I searched for "woke hulk" and just got ignorant people who thought that She-Hulk was a woke invention and not just Marvel Comics doubling down on dumb to pad their wallets.
My bad I meant someone else. There's a film blogger who goes by the pen name of Film Crit Hulk. Shouldn't be hard to find.
He was always pretty bad, honestly. Look at this, his response to the boston marathon bombing:
https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2013/04/15/thoughts-in-the-immediate-wake-of-the-patriots-day-bombing
He wrote the whole thing in character, in all caps. He's incapable of sincere feeling that isn't expressed through a pop-culture lens, it's the framework for his understanding of the universe. Even in moments of intense, apparently personal feeling, he's got the mask up. I remember thinking at the time it's like those pick up artists who name themselves stuff like Mystery and have to put on a persona to talk to women because when they are what they think of as their true self they can't handle intimacy. It's deeply sad.
This one isn't so bad from my perspective. Just seems like a guy grieving. Writing in all caps and third person was his gimmick for years, and he dropped that gimmick immediately following Trump's election.
His post-2016 stuff is easier to read, but man oh man I almost wish it wasn't. It's utterly deranged. We're talking Noah Berlatsky territory.
Your fascination with this guy reminds me of my own feelings towards Aaron Rupar. That guy is singularly responsible for me blocking vox.com from my Google News feed. He apparently doesn't work for them anymore, but the damage is done. I groan every time one of his troll-tweets makes it into the news. He contributes nothing and is akin to something like an anti-liberal, or anti-thinker.
Yeah I feel ya. It's not healthy. I'm trying my hardest to get away from that crowd he represents.
I've seen bits and pieces of Rupar's uh....work. I remember him scolding people at a Notre Dame football game celebrating a win during the pandemic. What a maroon.
I think it's a snapshot of a moment when he simply can't be real, despite obviously wanting to and having something real to say, and all the goodwill in the world from people ready to hear it. I remember disliking him before that for the gimmick and the bad movie opinions but this essay really crystallized something for me about people who use product love as a prosthetic identity. It's something I've come back to again and again in my head as people started using marvel movies in political arguments, every girl on tinder started mentioning their Hogwarts house and you started seeing the phrase 'cheeto voldemort' thrown around sincerely by people with a pathological attachment to their childhood toys who were forced to grapple with actual real world issues and politics. They can't do it so they retreat to a world where opinions are easily digested facts, and all the bad guys are ugly.
I remember a comment an activist made about 'gamergate,' that 2014 meltdown that has served as a model for internet media types melting down in the decade since. he said something like 'I'm out here fighting for the 15 dollar minimum wage, with guys literally in my face threatening me. Tomorrow I'll be going to a rally to end the deportation of illegal immigrant factory workers, and more guys will be in my face threatening me. But I'm used to it. For these gamergate types, they've been threatened for the first time, and it's literally the end of the world, because nothing like this has EVER HAPPENED TO THEM. It's transformative.'
That's a perfect description of Film Critic Hulk, like a lot of the extremely online crowd. I'm sure I can find an example of him melting down about gamergate, now that I think about it. They're people who have been traumatized in large part because they were so sheltered before, in their land of play and sanitized disney morality.
Ugh Gamergate. Some people still won't shut up about that. They're all like "Gamergate more than anything else led to January 6" and I'm like oh come the fuck on.
I don’t get out to movies much any more, but actual foreign movies made to please people in their own countries, probably suffer less from this.
Parasite, for instance, is the very opposite of a social justicey movie
Yeah, Parasite was a movie that tried to make a point about rich people being shitty but then ultimately made the poor look much shittier.
Or alternatively, it maybe *wasn’t* trying to make that point…
Just say what you’re saying... those rhetorical devices don’t work in a text chat.
Parasite was a movie that explicitly said its thesis at the dinner scene: the rich people are nice because they can afford to be nice, and they do nothing wrong but simply through the extreme wealth and power disparity and the total dependence of one family on another, the poor family ends up degraded and destroyed. The sin of the poor is dreaming of having more and being unworthy; the sin of the rich is not even SEEING the poor family as truly human for one single solitary minute.
I think you meant to say “the sins of the rich” in the last sentence, am I right? But yeah, that makes sense.
The best interpretation of Parasite is that the poor family aren't actually poor. They're precariously middle class with aspirations of being wealthy. They envy what the rich family has but have come to believe that it is out of their reach by any normal means.
I read a great review, which I think I got from a link in astralcodexten, which posited that, based on South Korean cultural expectations, the ‘parasite’ specifically refers to the dad, because he never fulfilled his societal expectation of providing for and launching his children. Which I thought was an interesting perspective.
My reading of it was that it was the daughter who was the serious con artist. She pushes the family into way more than they’d otherwise have done. But perhaps from a SK perspective it’s also a father’s responsibility not to have his daughter go off the rails!
Can you post a link to the review? I read a lot of South Korean fiction and generally find the social issues there an interesting contrast to the US.
I can't figure out how to find it, I'm afraid! It wasn't some name person on a big-brand site and searching ASX for "parasite" at the moment to jog my memory (and for all I know it might have been some other site I was reading anyway) just brings up a whole bunch of stuff about Ivermectin...
Lost upon the winds of time
Good luck on the surgery! I would nominate Judas and the Black messiah as another example bad art that got good reviews due to representational concerns. I’d still rather watch Selma again, not necessarily for the politics but because it’s just so much better made than Judas.
With zero expectations I might have enjoyed it, unfortunately I had already heard an interview with the director and read at least one glowing review so I hated it.
For a split second I thought you were referring to the D’Angelo album, and I was gonna go to war. 😆
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Messiah_(album)
But some quick googling set me straight. It’s a shame that movie isn’t good — there’s definitely a great movie to be made about Fred Hampton.
Hey, random request: could you email Carina? carina dot substack at gmail
Got it. ‘Bout anything in particular?
None of your beeswax. Until she tells you 😂
😳
Watson, the game is afoot!
Nothing bad I promise!
Okay -- I hit you up. (Sorry for the delay!)
For sure---I don’t think anyone praises D’Angelo simply because of his obliquely Black liberationist politics, they praise him because he’s an utterly transcendent musical genius.
Best wishes for a speedy recovery.
I rather liked Promising Young Woman even though I am usually allergic to films with an overbearing message. [From an earlier comment of mine:] The film was to my mind more subtle than the outward presentation and many viewers were unable to parse that Mulligan's character was both fighting for a righteous cause but was also bordering on deranged and committing deeply immoral acts. It seemed to me many of the reviewers were unable to view the acts in the film as morally complex, instead sitting at either "she's a monster and woman deserve better heroines" or "I adored watching this righteous quest; you go girl!" To my mind, the film is about how the pernicious poison of sexual assault blackens and ruins all that it touches; such acts destroy the lives of everyone in the vicinity, leaving only twisted rage and grief. In that respect the film is genius.
I know a few people who have become singualrly defined by a traumatic event in their past. Promising Young Woman captures with uncanny accuracy how those people became unanchored from the world and people who care about them, slowly poisoning themselves yet further in a doomed effort to get justice.
I want to believe you're right and this was the intent of the filmmakers, but I think you're interpolating in themes that they were nowhere near nuanced enough to deliberately insert.
That could be but I really do think that was the intent. The film takes the time to have multiple characters tell Mulligan that they are worried about her and encourage her to move on with her life, both her own parents and the mother of her decesed friend. The scenes where she kidnaps the daughter of the dean and then prentends to the dean that she has left her underage daughter in the company of unsavory men are framed as the acts of a sinister and cruel person, and the film very deliberately invites us to imagine that Mulligan did indeed do something so dispicable. When Mulligan goes to confront the laywer who defended the rapist she is shocked when the lawyer begs for her forgivenss; the moment reality departs from her narrative of revenge she is dumbstruck and cannot properly process it. When she finally answers the calls of Alison Brie's character the film makes it clear that Mulligan, now in a healthier frame of mind and beginning to move on with her life, realizes that she did something wrong and she rather sheepishly assures Brie that she was not in fact assualted by a stranger while drunk. Of course, the film of her friend being raped is then provided to her and the righteous singular purpose of Mulligan's life reaserts itself.
To my mind the dichotomy is abundantly clear. I think people had trouble recognizing it because of when the film came out; it was (and still is) difficult to imagine someone would make a film about someone doing the wrong thing for the right reasons vis a vis sexual assault in 2021.
I think you're right about what the film was trying to say, but I also think it said it really badly. Like, the whole nice guy thing, the Ultimate Revenge at the end that doesn't even really make any sense, it's just a hot mess. And not in a 'look how damaged this person has been' kind of hot mess. More like "i don't write well but I sold a screenplay"
I haven't seen either, but your analysis of the two conveys an all-too-familiar art trope these day; namely, that the message should always be paramount to anything else...including the art. Besides the obvious error here (art quality should never really take a back seat to anything) it's also just plain exasperating.
I read recently that Oscar Wilde was a big proponent of something called aestheticism; the idea that art should exist for art's sake, and not be subservient to socio-political themes. While I both agree with him on principle, and would say that there's nothing inherently wrong with having your art be a reflection of said socio-political themes, I think modern artists would do the form much more genuine justice if they concentrated more on producing great art first, and sending a message second.
Anyone can call out social injustice, just read Twitter for 5 minutes. But only a great artist can do so both without you realizing it because the medium is so sublime, and in a form whose beauty will still be just as beautiful if you took away the message.
Or as one of the original Hollywood moguls once said, “If you want to send a message, try Western Union.”
Yes. Guernica is a masterpiece about the Spanish Civil War, but it’s not a masterpiece *because* it’s about the Spanish Civil War.
One thing to my own credit - I am fairly immune to how “politics” are injected into movies, television, etc. I can evaluate a program/movie without being sidetracked by those considerations. Acting, story, flow, suspense can pretty much be separate from “underlying messages” for me.
In fact, I do not look to filmmakers for political import or wisdom - I assume they generally will not be good at it.
So I enjoyed PYW because of the acting, fairly unique story, some compelling scenes, and the payoff. Certainly over the top in many ways, but for me it worked.
And that’s the bottom line - you don’t have to find the “messaging” to be artful to enjoy the film. There are lots of ways for a movie to be sophisticated/nuanced or to fail at same, but the “political messaging” alone is just one piece.
But I will watch Invisible Man. Thanks!
"the people who make those decisions think that movies by women or people of color are meant to be political first and foremost."
I am reminded of a report of marketing failure back in the early 80's, regarding 'cars for women'. Manufacturers (or perhaps car dealers) put a great deal of effort into painting select fancy models pink with lots of chrome, only to watch them sit on the lot. When making their own choices, women wanted excessively practical cars with extra safety features.
If women & 'minority' film makers have visions that are so different as to be valued for their unique flavor, it follows that those flavors may not be to the taste of a majority of film watchers.
The most interesting and believable villain is the one that thinks that he is the hero, and he may even sort of have a point.
Two things:
I think Kathryn Bigelow's Hurt Locker is a shining example of what's possible for the future of art made by not-just-men.
Second, and this is incidental, this reminded me of something my mom told me about a friend back in the 80s: the woman's husband would tell her he was going out of town then he'd hide in the house and do things to scare her. YEESH. thankfully she successfully divorced him.
Also Bigelow’s Point Break — which is a ridiculous film, but also a great and moving and extremely beautiful film.
Point Break is phenomenal. Perfect Flick.
I remember a lot of sneering at Hurt Locker when it came out, but I think at that point I spent a lot of time with members of the US military, and many of them disliked the movie. I just watched it for the first time a couple of days ago and thought it was very good.
The behavior of that husband sounds horrific. One of those sorts of things you see in that creepy suspense movie that doesn't feel like it could happen in reality as you ask yourself "no one is really that depraved, are they?"
The Hurt Locker Hate was and remains real. I think it comes down to the military-civilian divide; it doesn’t matter how well done the cinematography and editing and acting and the so on so forth are if every single detail about everything is utterly, atrociously, willfully, disrespectfully wrong. For a film to purport to be a gritty, bleak glimpse at the reality of the Iraqi occupation from the American perspective, it sure as hell didn’t see the actual reality of the Iraqi occupation from the American perspective as being worth depicting.
The Hurt Locker is an extremely bad war film. Like, it's beautiful, the cinematography is great and the acting is fine and it's got emotions and stuff. But holy crap is it a dumb picture
I actually don’t remember the plot that well. It just jumped to mind as a film by a woman that was decidedly not A Woman’s Issues Film. Wanna refresh me?
It's been a while but Jeremy Renner plays a bomb disposal guy who is so bad at his job that he would have gone to prison for it. He does stuff like take souvenirs of stuff that realistically would have been turned in as evidence to help identify bomb makers, he takes off his gear at one point, he's cavalier with his own and others' lives in ways that are unrealistic, especially with everyone else sort of putting up with it. The movie sells him as this badass cowboy who is also a meticulous technician who has been PUSHED TO THE EDGE but in real terms he's just a guy who would get discharged really quickly for having zero discipline.
Also it got a lot of hype for being well-researched but there's some stuff that is egregiously technically wrong that I don't personally remember but actual military people notice. Oh and it had the regular CSI problem where these support guys are suddenly investigating and arresting people.
When it came out the whole military booed, essentially. People tried to spin that as misogyny but it wasn't, they just didn't like the inaccurate fantasy of their jobs. Being totally unrealistic is fine when a film is fun to watch but works worse when it's got some heavy-handed message about trauma.
Yeah I read a couple reviews along these lines. Funny, that kind of behavior WOULD get you fired or court-martialed or whatever, and would get you FLAYED in the media today if it was something that actually happened.
Yeah. There's a ton of examples of people being super irresponsible in wartime, you can get stories about it from pretty much any veteran, some kid picks up an unexploded mine and ends up blowing his ass off or something, or an asshole shoots in the air instead of a barrel of sand and ends up hitting a guy and going to jail. but the kind of stuff his character is doing isn't the same sort of thing at all, it's being bad at and irresponsible with his specific specialty, and is particularly bad because there are no consequences and in reality the military loves consequences.
Speedy recovery to you!
This was a great post. Good luck with surgery!