Do you ever feel you’ve been had, or at least put-upon, by what some will urge upon you as ART?
Tonight I finished, after three highly tedious sessions over as many nights and lots of fast-forwarding, trying to watch "There Will Be Blood." I kept thinking it would get better. Some of the ways in which it was off-putting at the start reminded me of "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" — the same sort of heavy-handed atmosphere that seems designed to rub into your head the notion that "the West in olden times was really weird, and not at all like a Gene Autrey movie" — and that one got better. I even enjoyed it by the end.
But this did not. Yes, Daniel Day-Lewis acted up a storm, but that’s all there was to it — an actor showing off, really getting into a character that I was sick of by the second reel, a character not worth getting into. So he’s done various American archetypes now — the raw nativist of "Gangs of New York," the effeminate dandy of "The Age of Innocence," and now the rapaciously driven oil man — but frankly, I think he’s repeating himself. In fact, I felt like, having seen his "Bill the Butcher," I’ve already seen the character he did in "There Will Be Blood." And the first version was much, much more interesting, even though "Gangs" is probably tied with "Innocence" in my mind for least-appealing Scorcese movie.
Anyway, it’s presented me with a tough decision. On Netflix, should I give it two stars for "didn’t like it," or the rare one star for "hated it?"
Maybe two stars. Now that I’ve griped to y’all about it, I’m not as ticked as I was about the time I wasted. I need to save the one-star rating for awfulness that is truly inspired, truly worth hating, like Lynch’s "Dune."
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I’ve seen it about 6 or 7 times now. I think its the best American film in many years. C’mon, Brad, there’s much more to it than “an actor showing off.” I think the impact was diminished for you by not watching the whole thing at once. There are many subtlties in the narratvie and DDL performance.
And what is it about? How American capitalism ultimately supplanted traditional religious belief as the new faith. “I am the third revelation.” Brilliant.
Brad, I feel much the same way whenever I watch an episode of the Sopranos. For some reason my wife loves it. I find it extremely obnoxious, really just a vehicle for displaying graphic violence. I’m not sure why these films that cater to killing and death are so popular. Give me sex anytime.
> Give me sex anytime.
Bud – wasn’t that one of the main planks of the Bill Clinton Democrat platform?
I kid. I kid.
As far as movies go, stay away from Mamma Mia. I went along with my wife this past weekend and could not decide afterward whether it was the worst movie I’ve ever seen or just the dumbest. Watching less-than-attractive women sing Abba and then having to endure Pierce Brosnan doing the same was torture even George Bush would not support.
I didn’t care for Vantage Point. What’s the word too contrived?
Yep, that’s the word. Another term for it would be “high concept,” I think. It was lame, but I think I sort of knew it would be going in. What’s the last thing Dennis Quaid did that was really good? I’m thinking “The Big Easy.”
Doug, I weep for you. You truly have my sympathy.
bud touches on something I’ve mentioned before about the “Sopranos” — it’s a guy sort of thing that women can get into, although ambivalently. My wife watched the “Sopranos” right through the last episode with me, but she’s highly critical of the series, despite her having been glued to it.
I think one reason women can get into it — here I go with the oversimplifications, but hey, I’m a guy — is that it truly is a FAMILY drama. Beneath all the sex and violence and talk about gabagool, there are all the very-real-life plot lines about Carmela, Meadow and A.J. As I’ve said before, my wife identified with Carmela. Whaddayagonnado?
A segue — my wife and I instantly hated “Deadwood,” of which we watched less than an episode. The only things it had in common with the “Sopranos” was the overuse of the “F” word and painfully sordid situations. Trouble is, “Deadwood” didn’t offer anything else. There are few greater wastes of time than watching something written by people who use unimaginative profanity because, being on HBO, they’re allowed to (“did you hear what I said? I said a bad word! Listen, I’ll say it again!”) — and for no other discernible reason.
James, I think the effect of “Blood” was also diminished for me by the fact that it had nothing to say, beyond the tired Hollywood themes that present religious and business people as horrendous, malformed creatures.
In this variant of the theme, at least (in the end) the businessman isn’t a hypocrite, unlike the preacher. He’s just horrendous.
The thing that gets me about such themes as presented in film is that they are presented so seriously, as though the points they are making are terribly profound and fresh. But in a package such as this one, it’s all just painfully tedious and tiresome. Mind you, this is not Hollywood at its MOST tiresome. When it thought it was saying fresh, profound things in “Dances With Wolves,” now THAT was tiresome…
Doug, Mama Mia certainly was one dumb movie, no doubt about it. And Pierce Brosnan was a horrible singer. Still, for some reason I can’t explain I enjoyed it. The ABBA music took me back to a simpler time in my life. Also, the Greek scenery was magnificent. The young actress who played Sophie really could sing. And Meryl Streep did a good job.
Hokey story line – Absolutely. Bad singing. At times, yes. But it was all in good fun. What’s wrong with that? And it didn’t get so caught up in all the gratuitous sex and violence all too common in today’s movies.
Streep was marginally okay… a little too old for the role — she’s 58 — when the role might have been better suited to someone who was 40-45 (Catherine Zeta Jones proved she has the musical chops in Chicago and would be far easier to watch for two hours).
As for Streep’s two female co-stars — egads! Christine Baranski (56) and Julie Walters (58) were gruesome. The last time I felt so compelled to turn away from the screen was when Linda Blair was in the Exorcist.
My biggest complaint was that the Abba songs just seemed to be slapped into the plot without any purpose. Streep’s big dramatic number set to “The Winner Takes It All” was bizarre. Her duet with Brosnan on “SOS” made no sense. And Julie Walters singing “Take A Chance On Me” almost made me leave the theatre.
And [minor spoiler] having one of the main characters “turn gay” was ridiculous.
Doug I won’t argue with any of your points except for the one about Meryl Streep. At 52 I have a daughter roughly the same age as Sophie so Meryl Streep was not a bad choice for the role.
Do you ever feel you’ve been had, or at least put-upon, by what some will urge upon you as ART?
Funny you should ask… if I recall correctly, some years ago your son and I rented Logan’s Run at your suggestion. That’s two hours of my life I’ll never get back.
My top 100 (as of today):
1. Casablanca
2. 2001: A Space Odyssey
3. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
4. It’s a Wonderful Life
5. Psycho
6. Forest Gump
7. The Wizard of Oz
8. All Quiet on the Western Front
9. Vertigo
10. Deliverance
11. The General
12. Dr. Strangelove
13. American Graffiti
14. Citizen Kane
15. Vanilla Sky
16. The Graduate
17. Memento
18. Schindler’s List
19. The Best Years of our Lives
20. Bridge on the River Qwai
21. Fantasia
22. Cast Away
23. Flight of the Phoenix
24. Titanic
25. High Noon
26. Breaking Away
27. Rear Window
28. Pinochio
29. Fargo
30. Million Dollar Baby
31. Sunset Boulevard
32. Mary Poppins
33. Sgt. York
34. Sixth Sense
35. Babel
36. Saving Private Ryan
37. Gone with the Wind
38. American Beauty
39. Tora! Tora! Tora!
40. Catch 22
41. MASH
42. A Christmas Story
43. Apocalypse Now
44. The Deer Hunter
45. The Sound of Music
46. A Night to Remember
47. Pulp Fiction
48. Rebecca
49. The Birds
50. The Aviator
51. Mrs. Doubtfire
52. The Big Chill
53. Papillon
54. The Time Machine
55. Stagecoach
56. Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
57. Modern Times
58. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
59. The Ring
60. A Clockwork Orange
61. China Town
62. One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest
63. The Shining
64. Apollo 13
65. Blade Runner
66. Planet of the Apes
67. Eyes Wide Shut
68. Grease
69. Bonnie and Clyde
70. The Perfect Storm
71. Toy Story
72. Alien
73. Jaws
74. Groundhog Day
75. Minority Report
76. Ben Hur
77. The Grapes of Wrath
78. To Kill a Mocking Bird
79. The Silence of the Lambs
80. Some Like it Hot
81. The African Queen
82. V for Vendetta
83. The Third Man
84. Double Indemnity
85. 12 Angry Men
86. Snow White
87. North by Northwest
88. Lawrence of Arabia
89. City Lights
90. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
91. Annie Hall
92. Raiders of the Lost Ark
93. The Manchurian Candidate
94. Patton
95. Amadeus
96. Taxi Driver
97. Network
98. Cool Hand Luke
99. On the Beach
100. Sideways
Bud, No O’ Brother Where Art Thou or Cinderella Man?
Forget that — no “Godfather?”
But a pretty good list otherwise, bud.
And Wally — sorry about that. But by 1976 standards, it was fairly cool. Nowadays it just looks like a silly movie filmed in a mall. “The Island” did a similar thing better, but it’s not on my top ten either.
I didn’t like the Godfather for the same reasons I don’t like the Sapranos. In spite of all the critical acclaim it just comes across as a repetitive collection of gratuitous violence shots. The story line was fairly predictable and the thing never seemed to end. But that’s just me.
My wife and I took some time and watched the John Adams series over the past several days. Pretty good. Pretty obvious, too, that Adams was no libertarian.
The last one was really slow and tedious. As realistic as it is to lose one’s life partner, it gives me nightmares when it is drawn out like that (I also want to avoid it, if at all possible–can we please die at the same time?). I’ve been with dying people, including my parents, that’s not the problem. There was just something a little overdone in the dramatization of this.
Yes, it did seem to revel too much in misery, and not just in that episode. I appreciated the series nonetheless.
And bud, hats off to you on compiling your list. I tried late today to do something like it — compile my top 100 movies, without even trying to rank them — and couldn’t get it done. Even though I cheated by grabbing all of my “five star” ratings from Netflix and then paring the list.
That’s an imperfect method, by the way. As I was working on it, I realized that “It’s a Wonderful Life” — definitely on my Top Five — wasn’t on the list at all. I guess Netflix had never asked me to rate it. I’m sure some other really good ones are missing as well…