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I'm getting the sense that none of you ever bothered to read all of the lovely posts I made about Varda in my RT TCM thread 
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Don't worry guys, I can wheel out my Passion of Joan of Arc opinion again if you need to use up some excess eye rolls.
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They will be the most expressive and heart breaking eye rolls of all time.
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*rolls eyes in close-up*
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*Rolls eyes perfectly but once then retired from eye rolling forever*
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*rolls eyes repeatedly for two hours while getting yelled at*
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You can't get yelled at in a silent film! It's silent! Consider this mic dropped.
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The Straight Story 7.5/10
Couple of good performances, good directing and soundtrack for the least Lynchian film. I enjoyed it.
Couple of good performances, good directing and soundtrack for the least Lynchian film. I enjoyed it.
I agree with your comments. The film is already a bit of a classic, although its story was somewhat predictable. Very absorbing premise and acting.
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Don't worry guys, I can wheel out my Passion of Joan of Arc opinion again if you need to use up some excess eye rolls.
Don't worry, they've never stopped rolling.
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The Straight Story 7.5/10
Couple of good performances, good directing and soundtrack for the least Lynchian film. I enjoyed it.
Couple of good performances, good directing and soundtrack for the least Lynchian film. I enjoyed it.
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I'm getting the sense that none of you ever bothered to read all of the lovely posts I made about Varda in my RT TCM thread
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I saw this last year for the first time and it ended up in my Top 10 first-time watches of the year. I really enjoyed its simplicity and the earnest tone.
Like you have killers, obsession, people suiciding, dreams, nightmares and that's just speaking about his work after TP.
This one did put me a smile on my face though. Protagonist is very simple
and likeable, the only Lynch protagonist to be this way. I agree with you.
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I'd been a big Richard Farnsworth fan ever since seeing him in The Gray Fox (1982), and this film was a fitting swan song for him.
I agree with your comments. The film is already a bit of a classic, although its story was somewhat predictable. Very absorbing premise and acting.
I agree with your comments. The film is already a bit of a classic, although its story was somewhat predictable. Very absorbing premise and acting.
I think it holds up well, because after Elephant Men he proved that he can actually tell simple stories without twists and turns or weird characters/storylines etc.
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The more I think about the movie, the more I like it. And there's plenty to think about.
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There has been an awekening.... have you felt it?
There has been an awekening.... have you felt it?
Last edited by LChimp; 01-05-21 at 02:25 PM.
That's pretty cool that we found another RT poster in Jinnistan. I wonder how many other ones from that forum are lurking around here.
You can't hide for long...
You can't hide for long...
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I was immediately struck by the use of color photography when the tarot cards were being handled, but not for the whole scene, just for when the cards were being handled. The fact that when we see the faces of the two women everything's in black and white was really interesting to me as, that early in the film I didn't know if it was going to turn out that the film was in color and these women would be in black and white or the other way around. My friend who I got to watch it last night asked me what I thought the cards being in color means. Do you have any thoughts?
Varda actually uses color in another black and white film of hers, Les Creatures.
My sense was that it was done to give an otherworldly vibe to that sequence. Notice that the tarot card reading is incredibly specific. I took it as either implying that the psychic was real OR possibly that it's an indication of the headspace that Cleo is in--very open to "messages" from the universe. On the other hand, Varda does have a flair for framing and color, so it could be purely aesthetic.
I was particularly enamored of how she used mirrors thematically in the film. Mirrors can be so overdone and ham-fisted as symbolism, but Varda is actually so consistent with it, instead of using it as a thematic stab, that it becomes part of the fabric of the film. We see her in mirrors throughout the early part of the film as she preens over herself and is constantly putting on a show for herself, then we see her unhappy in the mirror a couple times, then we see her in the fragmented mirror (loved the shot where she sits down at the cafe and the post right next to her is covered with tiny mirrors so now even though she's at a mirror we can barely see her at all in it), and then finally in the broken mirror (we see her eye in it in this shot) before she is at last freed of mirrors and we do not see her reflection clearly again for the rest of the film.
Her fear of mortality causes her to notice that there is a world around her for the first time in our time with her.
The silent movie is another thing that was just brilliant. When it started I thought, "Do we really need to see this whole little silent movie?", but, in fact, we do, as it is an allegory for the whole film. Really loved that, what a great touch, especially with the doctor being carted away in the ambulance.
There are many other things I could talk about with this movie but I especially enjoyed the perspective. This really felt like a movie about a woman not a movie about how a man thinks a woman is and thinks and feels. In fact, I loved, as Roger Ebert pointed out, how the male characters and dialogue were written, really as the way a woman would hear us rather than how we think we sound.
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Wonder Woman 1984 - ★☆☆☆☆
- Patty Jenkins, 2020 -
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What the hell was that, then? I can't believe they had the nerve to release this, considering the state that it's in. I wasn't overly enamored with the first film, but it was at least able to present us with a decently paced story, at least until the final act. This moronic bloatfest of a sequel condescendingly ignores that, by not only doubling down royally on the original's weaknesses, but also by randomly adding layers of unwanted fat to the script and spacing out the (pathetically staged) action scenes to an obscene degree. The result is the one thing a superhero movie should never be: a blunderous, self-insisting hot mess that is soul-crushingly boring during even its best moments. I've heard rumors about this film having only one (major) deleted scene. That's sounds about right.
I kind of want to say that poor Gal Gadot deserves better, but I have to admit that her acting range does not appear to improve much over time. She certainly looks the part and she strikes a good pose, as always, but truly charismatic and emotionally captivating she is not. Chris Pine to the rescue? Well....Almost. He does what he can, but he seems uncertain what to do with the clumsy (and immoral) underpinnings of his resurrection story, at times. The Villains, then? One of them is Kristin Wiig, who gets herself I-wish-I-wish'd into the mousiest cheetah that ever walked the earth. Kinda cute, in a way, but far too inoffensive. The other villain is some corrupt CEO whose name totally escapes me right now and yells his kid's name a lot. I like Pedro Pascal, but his skeevy demeanor is indicative of a rather generic interpretation of a character we've seen a million times before.
So if even the performances can't save a film like this, then what can? Probably nothing. As far as I'm concerned, this movie belongs on the bottom of the DC barrel, along with, well, all the others. It's by far the worst major film I've seen this year, one that makes even Tenet look like a masterpiece by comparison. Perhaps we'll have a "Jenkins Cut" to look forward to?
I can't imagine that this is the film Patty Jenkins intended.
Such a shame that these studios don't seem to be able to get out of their own ways. One wonders (no pun intended), did Wonder Woman slip through the cracks while Snyder was out and now that he's back it had to adhere to the "more is always better" ethos that DC/Warner seem to think makes a winner?
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