Movie Recommendations and Discussion

General Off-Topic Discussion
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I watched Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold (from a script by Abbas Kiarostami) for the second time a few weeks ago. I last saw it in 2021/2022.

I really like it because it uses a variety of locations to show alienation (class divide, mental illness, or whatever you like, really). There are some really nice visuals. There’s a scene where the main character falls into a pool in a luxury apartment, and the apartment’s owner is talking on a big fat 90s cordless phone behind frosted glass and doesn’t even notice the splash … it’s a really nice way to illustrate alienation.

However, plot wise, I can’t follow it unless I read the synopsis. “Crimson Gold” uses non-actors, but that’s not really a problem. I think it’s partially Kiarostami’s writing, since most of his films kind of meander.

It’s also partially Panahi’s direction – like the lack of any audiovisual indication that almost everything after the first scene is a flashback. It’s like the opposite of LOST: whereas every LOST flashback had a whoosh sound that allowed it to jump anywhere it wanted to in a coherent manner, this movie wants to be circular as possible while otherwise presenting itself as linear as possible.

Again, concerning the first scene. The first scene takes place in the same jeweller’s shop that a key argument takes place in mid-film, but each scene is shot in completely different way and looks at first glance to be in a different location. (The core dispute isn’t explained very well in the dialogue either.)

It’s weird that this movie has these problems, especially since Panahi and Kiarostami have such a huge focus on location. Panahi goes into detail on his use of location in “This Is Not a Film.” “Crimson Gold” is not too early of a work from Panahi — it’s his fourth feature film — so that doesn’t explain much.

Has anyone else seen “Crimson Gold”? Is it more coherent to you? Am I just crazy? Thoughts on Panahi/Kiarostami in general?

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I haven’t seen Crimson Gold, but your review resonated with me for a ton of reasons where I had a very similar reaction (with similar details) to a horror film I saw last night, called Amulet (2019).

But first… re: Abbas Kiarostami, the first film I saw of his was A Taste of Cherry (1997) at the Sydney Film Festival in 1998. It was my first taste of loud festival-goer reactions. The film involves a truck driver thinking of unspectacularly killing himself by just placing himself in a hole in the ground. I remember coming out and overhearing some guy complaining, ‘I wish he had just put himself in the ground!’ I know that sounds nonsensical in light of my summary of the film, but I remember it made sense at the time. I understood this to be his complaint about how boring he’d found the film. Sure it was leisurely, but I liked it.

The film I voted for as best at that festival was the Japanese mystery-horror Cure. The film that won was the feel-good French Marius and Jeanette. Does anyone talk about Marius and Jeanette now? No. On the other hand, when Ari Aster went in Criterion’s closet and picked up Cure, he said there was an argument for it being the greatest film ever made. Shows how ******* astute I am!

Anyway, Amulet is a UK horror film that you’d call very artsy and roughly falls into the Ari Aster vibe of ‘magnificent horrible revelations’. I also found it really hard to follow. It had several time streams, intercut but not in any pattern. No helpful whoosh sounds. Not much dialogue, but moments of vital dialogue that if you blink, you’ve lost it.

I thought I was on top of it enough by the end, but I clearly wasn’t. I found this out because, having seen it and thought it had been too obscure about stuff I needed to understand, I googled it. Normally I’d look at viewer discussion, but there was none even broaching the levels I was unsure about. In fact, it seems a lot of people had already interpreted, or exited the pursuit of the narrative, at far earlier levels. Summaries of the film vary a LOT.

I ended up doing what I’d traditionally hate doing, but it was the only place answers were forthcoming – the major result is the director, in conversation, discussing the ending and meaning at length! But nobody else was doing what I needed. Whatever I thought about a lot of the mid-range stuff, I had completely missed the point of the ending, which does have concrete elements.

So this all left me in a pretty perplexed zone. The film is incredibly effective at a poetic and visceral level, even if you don’t grok the end. But overall I thought, 'Well, I worked pretty hard, and it still didn’t land. And all the evidence I read shows I probably had more of a handle on it than most people. I think this means it was just a bit too obcsure about lower-level stuff. If you can’t even grab that stuff, what hope of you for the high level? Would this be solved by repeat viewings (people say they’ve made them). Am I obligated to repeat viewing anything? Of course not, but as a prolific filmgoer, I notice the most obvious question I ask myself at the end of any film is – would I watch it again? For certain kinds of films, the answer tells me what I think of that film versus the other 5000.

So @pbparjeter thanks for giving me some context to talk about a different but similar experience. I’m certainly interested in Crimson Gold, now.

-Wade

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A Taste of Cherry (1997)

I think I read somewhere that the ending (zoom out onto film crew) was pretty controversial because it’s kind of unnecessarily meta.

I’d say it’s one of the Kiarostami films with the most sense of urgency — which isn’t saying much. But there’s a scene where the suicidal main character excitedly rushes back to the guy who was supposed to bury him; the audience thinks the main character has found a reason to live, but he actually corrects the burial process. It’s a pretty striking and memorable depiction of manic depression — assuming I’m remembering it right.

If you liked “Taste of Cherry” I’d recommend “Certified Copy” over anything else. The more recent filming date, the partly more high-profile cast, and the partial English/French dialogue all make it a bit more surface-level interesting for a Western audience IMO. There are also a few subtle visual tricks with mirrors that drive home the “what is a real and what is a copy” theme.

The film I voted for as best at that festival was the Japanese mystery-horror Cure

I mostly watch pretty gentle horror … I haven’t seen “Cure” but I enjoyed “Retribution” by the same director (Kiyoshi Kurosawa). Very much about grief without any explicit content. I’ve seen a few others of his but didn’t really connect with most.

I’ll probably watch his non-horror “To the Ends of the Earth” again at some point…I got partially through it at the last minute as it left Criterion a few months ago.

I notice the most obvious question I ask myself at the end of any film is – would I watch it again? For certain kinds of films, the answer tells me what I think of that film versus the other 5000.

It’s funny, I ask myself the opposite question … “If I could never see this movie again, how much would I remember of it, and how striking would the recollection be?” Sometimes I don’t re-watch movies that I like the most because I don’t want to ruin the memory, and instead I just rewatch clips from them.

The films I didn’t think much of the first time are the ones that sometimes nag me for a re-watch. Others I just fail to connect with though.

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Cool, I’ll keep an eye out.

There are lot of conspicuously good, great or worthy films that I only watch once – maybe the majority of such films. Part of that is they may not be a film that needs to be in the fabric of my life, or that are sensorially interesting to sit through again. Or maybe they’re great but three hours long… I’m really sick of the average film duration creeping up so hugely at the cinema.

When I was a kid, I watched some films a zillion times, and recorded them or kept renting them from the video store, and they were just built into my life. I sort of regret I can’t get to know as many films so well now, but I still want to try to add films to that library, starting by watching them a second time.

Even films I have seen a ton, the older I get the more I watch them, I often think – Hang on, did I really understand this bit or that line last time I saw this? Is it because I was younger, or just because I’m forgetting my interpretation of it on viewings between young and approaching fifty? Memories from being younger are seem more clear about what I understood or didn’t about a film, but of course they can ripple and change in your brain, too, without you realising.

For me there are zero films in the category of: I wouldn’t want to re-watch this per se because I’m worried about my memory of it changing in general. But there are films I don’t want to re-watch with an audience in a cinema, because the memory of seeing them in a cinema as a kid is precious to me, and I remember things about my experience of that screening. And I’m scared a retro screening (too often people laughing wall to wall) will bump bits out. But it depends on the film.

I went to a retro screening of Flash Gordon, and the audience was out of control, but this didn’t erase my memory of seeing it as a kid. On the other hand, less broadly popular films, it can be great. I went to a double of The Untouchables and The Hunt For Red October a few years ago – and both of those loom hugely in my childhood memories. And the retro screening was not a nuts audience and I loved it.

So, memory, time, all re very complicated the longer you keep watching movies. But there’s also that view that a really great film feels new every time you see it. I feel like that about Blue Velvet. Watched it many times, very familiar with it, and simultaneously I feel like I’m watching it as me right now each time.

-Wade

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I’ve watched a few movies the past couple of weeks:

Alone: A very serviceable movie with a very standard horror plot-- psycho stalks and kidnaps woman. Does a better-than-average job of keeping the heroine from doing dumb shit.

The Royal Hotel: A very odd thriller which sets up the girl-tourists-in-peril trope effectively and then veers weirdly. I have extremely conflicting feels about this one, which probably means it’s worth seeing. I’m not sure men would find this as scary as women would, but maybe I’m selling them short.

Stopmotion: In the grand tradition of gross-out puppets, this extremely weird movie is about a stop motion animator losing her mind. Very gory and with, as you’d expect, a lot of creepy stop motion. Just a dark, bloody little weirdo movie.

Out of Darkness: Prehistoric people meet something scary. All in an invented language with no subtitles, the actors do a pretty good job of conveying what they’re talking about, most of the time. The scary thing they meet is pretty predictable, and I didn’t love the movie, but it was an interesting experiment.

Edit: I forgot one.
Double Blind: A zippy and ridiculous movie about a drug test gone horribly wrong. Messy and pseudoscientific, but fun.

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I know about The Royal Hotel but hadn’t heard of the others. Where did you watch these?

-Wade

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I enjoyed Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving which is a very well made one of those by which I mean holiday-themed character-masked slasher where the cast are knocked off one by by one. This is a great popcorn group-watch. The gore is excruciating but the tone is tongue-in-cheek slasher with characters who have it coming so you don’t feel bad for cringing and laughing hysterically.

This is actually the full rendition of Roth’s Grindhouse trailer of the same name which was hilariously awful and disturbing exactly as you expect from a “Video Nasty” that would get banned. Their backstory is the 70’s Thanksgiving trailer is all that exists - all copies of the movie were burned and the new movie is a “reboot” of that idea.

So this is a teen-slasher giallo-esque that fills a gap where there were no serious Thanksgiving themed slasher movie entries as there are with nearly every other holiday. This faithfully gives you something you want from every holiday horror movie - something bad happened in the past, someone wants revenge, it could be anyone in that mask, and it’s also got the disturbing-uber-plan element in that the killer doesn’t just want to kill every person on their list, they want to get them all together and let them watch each other suffer in a finale art-piece master plan, cribbing a bit from Happy Birthday to Me

The showpiece kills are gruesome and relentless without making you feel dirty. The movie’s killer is silently charismatic and has all the requisite teleporting-ninja-brutality that makes you want to root for them like a superhero. The movie’s centerpiece (not a metaphor) killing is one that would have squicked me out if there wasn’t that goofy popcorn horror movie tone. This is a movie that you won’t feel bad for liking - it’s also laughing with you at how disturbing and over-the-top it is.

I think Eli Roth has matured as a filmmaker. I know Hostel has humor and a message in it but its soul is so black-hearted that it isn’t a fun movie to watch. The fact that Roth figured out how to make the notorious trampoline kill from the Grindhouse trailer work in this modern reboot without getting slapped down by the MPAA is a happy and still-cringey surprise.

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Streamed on various platforms. Netflix, Amazon, etc. Tom subscribes to everything.

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Oh, everything! Yeah that doesn’t make it easy to track.

I’m the opposite. The starting place is: I go to a ton of things at the cinema. At home, 80% of the time I’m subscribed to nothing. When I subscribe to one thing for a month, I go all out on movies on that thing. And it’s almost never a mainstream option (Netflix) as they’ll have everything I saw at the cinema or could watch later on TV.

This basically becomes… the only thing I subscribe to is Shudder (who have all horror and thrillers, and none of the ones I saw at the cinema because those will have been snapped up by the mainstream channels!) and I can’t do it very often as it’s too much of a hit to my productivity.

I’ve managed to collect about two and a half months of free Disney+ (which is quite a feat for that channel) by having a Fetch box, and managed to see most of their old, weird back catalogue items that are nowhere else in that time.

-Wade

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Yeah I quite liked the new Thanksgiving, too. Though a few months later, my memories of the opening disaster setpiece in the supermarket are stronger than my memories of the film as a while.

-Wade

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I went to opening night of Immaculate last week, the new nun/Omen-ish horror film starring and co-produced by Sydney Sweeney. And it surprised and actually shocked me with its extremity, and for that, I instantly loved it.

Immaculate is not from Blumhouse. I was expecting variable Blumhouseish fare – i.e. Blumhouse are prolific, and they sometimes kill it, but by the laws of odds, too many feel familiar – but this well past what Blumhouse usually achieve. The production design and quality, the texture, measured pacing, everything was beyond in quality.

And then there’s the violence, also in a context of imprisonment and pregnancy. I could barely believe the film wasn’t rated R here (it got MA15+, one step down). As one review pointed out, “The film’s final act contains some of the most twisted, gory violence this particular subgenre of horror has seen in years, ultimately recalling nothing less than the films of the ultra-violent New French Extremity movement.” I had this awareness when watching it.

Anyway, I think the greatest thing that could happen is that people fresh from watching Sydney Sweeney in Madame Web and Anyone But You go into this for a Blumhouse time and come out pulverised.

-Wade

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We used to, but then pandemic, and then elder care which meant we could almost never both go anywhere, plus we live way out in the middle of nowhere, so it’s a bit of a road trip to go to the theater. Years passed this way and now it’s second nature to stream. We’ve started going to the theater again, but the pickings are slim recently because of the strikes. Y’all in Australia make all the good movies these days anyway.

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Yeah. I’m very fortunate to live in a major city, so I can walk to two cinemas and others are only a stone’s throw away. But also, I’ve got a philia for cinemagoing that’s beyond most people’s.

-Wade

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Well, we saw Dune part 2.

It was stunningly beautiful, of course. But it was… slight. The religious/prophecy angle, the political/colonial angle, and the romance angle all seemed smushed together awkwardly, none of them particularly deep or connected well to the other parts. In particular, the leads had no chemistry together and the romance seemed unconvincing.

Caveats:
It’s been about 40 years since I read Dune, which I did because my best friend loved it and the David Lynch movie was coming out. I didn’t love it. I wasn’t mature enough to get it at that age-- the now-obvious parallels with oil, the middle east, etc-- all that was beyond me. So maybe if I was a mega fan I would have filled in the gaps with my imagination. Also, we streamed the first movie a couple of years ago and I confess I was not sober when we watched it, so I don’t remember whether I liked it or not.

I don’t know how faithfully the movies sticks to the books, but I was disgruntled to see the white oppressors (the Atreideses) simply taking over the power structure of the dark-skinned native Fremens with very little pushback. Really no pushback. A little bit of grumbling and then wham! They’re the powerful, the prophesied ones, the love interest, the holder of all memories and secrets of these people. Urgh.

But absolutely beautiful, no doubt. I wasn’t bored. I just didn’t like it much.

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Haven’t seen the movies (well, I saw the Lynch one back in the day…) but FWIW this is fairly faithful to the book – though to Herbert’s credit, when readers didn’t seem to generally pick up that that’s pretty messed up he wrote a sequel that really drove home the problematic nature of this whole Muad’dib thing.

(Then he wrote another two sequels about how it’d be kind of cool to turn into a sandworm. Then another two sequels about … something, presumably, but damned if I could tell you what. And then his son co-wrote like a billion more sequels and prequels about how it’s great to make money by driving an actually-pretty-good book into the ground – or so I assume, the step down to Keven J. Anderson, who I recognized as a visibly mediocre writer of Star Wars Expanded Universe books, was too far for me).

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I really dug Dune part 2. Not as much as part 1, but that for me is the fairly typical case of the setup of a story often being the most intriguing part.

If I have the most blah generalisation to make about a lot of films, I like the start better than the middle. But you can lift or sink everything with the end. A poor end brings everything down, and a good end can make you forget about all problems. And I still say this as someone for whom, the most typically forgotten part of a book or film is the end.

That may be your way of expressing what I liked most about it. As cinema, it’s never lazily directed at any point. Villeneuve is a director who who keeps finding aesthetically and sensorially interesting ways to present new scenes, and he does it for another two hours. I felt good from the first scene with the weird semi-silent ambush in the desert. The creepy floating motions. The black and white of Giedi Prime.

Of course, deserts themselves can get samey if you have to spend most of the film in them :slight_smile:

I read the book in my twenties but by then I’d already watched the Lynch film at least ten times, so I don’t remember much of the book. If it was in the book that Paul was exploiting a myth, rather than genuinely being it (it appears he does the latter in the Lynch film), I’d forgotten that, and politically that was the most interesting bit of this new film to me. And I thought really well handled.

But I thought the last shot of Dune 2 sucked. Chani getting pissed and going to the desert to express her independence? I don’t think her story was important enough for the film to say ‘Here’s what to keep in your head as we finish’, and it also drew us away from the momentousness of whatever had just happened. And increased the feelings of 'The film didn’t end. It was just another Marvel-like tail to the next film.

-Wade

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It’s in the book, but kind of between the lines - Dune Messiah is where that’s really made clear, IIRC.

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The name rings a bell, but I can’t pull up a single title off the top of my head, which isn’t a great sign.

[Googles bibliography.]

Ahhh… Okay. The Jedi Academy trilogy as well as Darksaber. I mean, Timothy Zhan he is not, but it’s still better and more internally consistent than the Sequel Trilogy. I also thought the idea of a Death Star prototype made total sense that they would make a proof of concept of the main armament before investing on wrapping a moon sized battlestation around a scaled up version of it. Either way, your point still stands.

DS_prototype
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Massive spoilers below:

Yes, this was all undeniably awesome. But the story just didn’t hold together for me. Paul goes out to the desert to learn to survive. There are giant spiders and poisonous scorpions and djinns! Cool, let’s see those! Nope. Chani comes to help him for a few minutes. Then that’s over and we’re riding a worm, apparently having learned everything in the space between shots. Also, he becomes a mastermind saboteur somehow. Better than the natives! He’s the leader! We don’t know how. It just is. He’s better than all these hardened, experienced natives, I guess because he’s the messiah. Maybe. All that whining about will-I-or-won’t-I bring the universe to catastrophe. Like, just don’t.

There’s a chaste kiss. Then we’re living in a tent together arguing and none of it seems like passionate, love-of-your-life stuff. Lots of pouting and eye-rolling that only serve to exacerbate that they look barely past puberty.

Why is Feyd-Rautha such a horrible sociopath? He didn’t strike me as particularly bad for a Harkonnen and better than most.

How come the Fremens want the fucking OPPRESSOR to be their wise woman? Like, WTF? How does that make any sense?

And the powerful emperor just gets taken at the end, 'cause he just goes there, despite having been told he’s gonna lose it all. Sure.

These and many more things bugged me to the point of not being able to suspend disbelief. Maybe all part of the books, maybe not. Stronger acting by the leads might have helped, but probably not.

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Yeah, I agree – though I think we’d also agree that’s a low bar! – and I remember enjoying those books when I was in middle school, but even then being aware that he wasn’t really bringing anything new to the table; Zahn had great villains and twisty plotting, Barbara Hambly had slightly-wonky but memorable characterization, Stackpole had his military SF thing, but all Anderson had was impressively sanded-down prose in service of generic plots. So very readable and well-constructed enough, but aggressively generic, which is a reasonable person to go to for Star Wars but not to continue the literary and deeply weird stuff Herbert did with Dune.

Continuing on with the spoilers from Amanda’s post:

In the book it’s supposed to take a couple years, I think, which is still absurdly fast but slightly more plausible – I remembered hearing the movie was going to speed this up, which seemed like a bad idea…

(Paul is kind of genetically engineered to pick stuff up really really quickly, though, so the “messiah” thing is on point).

Oh, man, I’m surprised they flubbed that. It actually makes total sense because Fremen culture has been entirely engineered as a Bene Gesserit contingency plan – all that stuff about Muad’dib and the values they venerate were planted to make it easier for the Bene Gesserit and/or the Kwisatz Haderach to take control of them if needed.

(The Muad’dib prophecy itself may or may not be entirely bunk – it’s certainly artificially seeded by the Bene Gesserit to match their Kwisatz Haderach program, which has some elements of prophecy but is IMO better understood as a prediction and statement of intent. But of course everybody is using spice and has precognitive powers so it’s hard to entirely discount).

I really liked Dune when I first read it, and keep meaning to go back, but then I realized something that makes it really hard for me to take it seriously anymore:

Kwisatz Haderach, give a dog a bone…

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