Watching Movies Alone with crumbsroom

Reducing a film to its absolute basic message (Crime doesn't pay), has a tendency to simplify what a film is saying, and erase what it is actually doing as a film.


Citizen Kane - Can we ever really know someone


Solaris - Don't live in the past


Christmas Story - You'll shoot your eye out


I guess we could call Scarface a warning about crime and the consequences of living a life of it. But it's also a criticism of capitalism. A very early condemnation of an entire decades absurdly decadent Zeitgeis before it had even begun. A discussion of the hollowness of the American Dream as seen through the immigrant experience. A homage to classic gangster films. A family tragedy. And all other sorts of reductions that also don't quite touch the cocaine freeze of its heart.


And of course, we aren't even getting to the style, which with DePalma, is always at least a large part of the point. Does the film glamourize or castigate Tony's lifestyle by how DePalma employs it? Are we meant to simply enjoy it's ugly thrills vicariously, or is more going on here.


I don't think it's his best. But it is a film brimming with interesting contradictions, and a controversially unhinged performance (maybe the beginning of the end of top shelf Pacino), and an incredible cinematic sense bolstered by an equally incredible score.


But, yes, it indeed also shows us that crime doesnt pay. But why stop there?

I always find it odd when an older movie like this manages to get eyes on it from people who are not in the demographic of people who would like a movie (I usually assume lesser known movies tend to draw people who are predisposed to like it).
Maybe people expecting a more traditional giallo?

It sounds like a lot of people were annoyed a movie called The Possessed wasn't a straight horror film, let alone giallo.

AFTERSUN


A film about memory, doing what memories do best. Linger like ghosts. Follow us everywhere. Guide the rest of our lives. And yet, always too vaporous to ever explain to anyone else what they look like. What they feel like. Why we keep thinking back on them. If they are what fill you with the kind of joy that makes life worth all the struggle, or if they are what cause you to suddenly burst into tears in the middle of the street.


Unlike most films, which would go out of their way to contextualize all of the fragmentary moments that Aftersun bathes in, explain their emotional parameters, what life experiences they were born from, where they inevitably lead to, what the characters are thinking as they occur in real time, or think back on them from the future, this film is not about putting these sorts of things in a box. We understand enough of what is happening as we watch, and we can tell well enough what happens once the memories are suddenly cut short, that to intrude on them with explanations of how they have made us who we are, and how we feel about them, would be to rob them of their elemental power. Like ghosts, they leave us nothing if we reach out to grab them. They are best left hovering just out of reach.

As usual, you easily calcify something into words that I was having trouble putting my finger on. I still think of this film often all these months after seeing it, and when I do, it's almost as if my mind doesn't want to participate, and I instead have this weird, sort of blurry visceral reaction. Part of me wants to revisit it in an attempt to get a better handle on it, but part of me does not.

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I think this is essential to why the film works. We only ever have partial understanding because the characters themselves only have partial understanding. There's understanding in the moment, and understanding looking back at the past, but it's never a complete picture.

What I loved about it is the film essentially gets you to pick through the memories of someone else, in much the same way I pick through my own. Somehow, when looking back, even the most banal of moments become charged with all sorts of conflicting emotions once you realize they are what end up leading to the most monumental of conclusions.



And now I find myself looking back on my memories of this film with the same mixture of grief and joy and shame that colour my own memories.



It's really remarkable how the whole thing works. How heavily it walloped me.

I thought Mescal's performance was amazing. The whole film has really grown on me in reflection. From the review I wrote back when I first watched it, I'm very curious to see how I'd respond to a rewatch.

It is a movie designed to grow upon reflection.


It might be my favorite film I've seen since Florida Project (not including Skinamarink)

Subsequent re-watches of The Florida Project have only enhanced my adoration for the film. Heartbreaking stuff.

Talk to Me isn't very good.


It's not awful. But it also kinda is.

It is. But it's also beautiful. Really, really beautiful.


Everything beautiful is on the verge of being heartbreaking.

The recent horror film? I quite liked it (and it helped that I had a very good theater experience with it).

I almost fired it up again last night, as in, I had it up on my TV ready to hit play, but then I remembered I am trying to cram for two noir countdowns while also trying to get some of the 2023 Best Picture noms up on my screen, as well. Logic got the better of me, as I have seen The Florida Project multiple times at this point. I almost hit play anyway, though.

I think for it to have worked for me, it was important for me to buy into the dynamic between the characters. And I didn't. Which left me with a film that really didn't impress me as a film. Occassionally superficially showy, then the rest of the time, a pretty meat and potatoes bland delivery.





The concept itself seemed open to lots of promise, but ultimately, I don't think they really did much with it.

See, I did buy into the dynamics between the main character and her adopted family, and the way that the events of the film force them all to confront just how deep their "family" bond really is.

I can tell it's all technically in there and I could feel the film sniffing around the edges of deeper meaning. But for it to matter to me, there needs to be moments where I understand who they are to each other, the lives they lead outside of what we are seeing, or at least, to have it portrayed in some kind of cinematic style which gives us an idea of their internal or emotional world. But all I saw here was a moment where they are singing along to Sia in a car.

How familiar are you with Hal Hartley? He has a bunch of films leaving criterion this month and I figured I’d catch some of his early stuff.

I think this was my favorite film of 2023 (I guess it depends what year someone counts A Night of Knowing Nothing, and even then, it's close).
I haven't watched it since around a year ago, but the one scene that still really sticks with me is the birthday sequence(s) of "for he's a jolly good fellow."
The first with his daughter, close and personal, making him feel connected to someone. And then when she gets a crowd of strangers to sing to him. I recall the film has this fade out as he's standing in the sun, giving the visual sense of becoming more distant. Capturing that peculiar social interaction of too many strangers trying to be cheerful and including you actually making you feel more alienated as you realize you don't know any of them. Or maybe the daughter is now just remembering that event and super-imposing that sense of disappearance on him. At least that's how I remember the scene. Maybe it's all wrong in my head. But that subtle emotional interplay sticks in my mind even more-so than the ending dance scene.