Yes, there’re definitely similarities in style between About Elly and A Separation. If you can track down a copy, you ought to see Farhadi’s third film (About Elly is his fourth; A Separation, fifth), entitled Fireworks Wednesday. It is also thematically similar, dealing with lies, family relationships, class struggles and a bit of political commentary for good measure. These three films really seem to form a trilogy in my mind—I’ve heard it called the “Lie” trilogy somewhere—and while I don’t think Fireworks Wednesday is quite as good as the other two, it’s definitely worth watching.
Well, now that he’s “officially” working with DiCaprio again, it’ll be interesting to see what comes of the Wall Street project.
I prefer Scorsese’s older films to his newer ones (I’d of course take Taxi Driver over Hugo any day), but I wonder if that isn’t just because I like to romanticize the past. I often wonder what the next generation of Scorsese viewers will think—will they start with his newer works and move backward? How will that affect their view of his filmography?
There are a few things about A Clockwork Orange that bother me, but Wendy Carlos’ soundtrack pretty much makes up for them. Carlos’ synthesizer work is great.
It’s sure rekindled my interest in Iranian cinema! Lately, I’ve been watching as many Ghobadi, Kiarostami and Majidi films as I can get my hands on, and I credit that to A Separation. I think the film got Western exposure at the right time politically too.
I don’t see how they’re that similar. Where’s Snyder’s Paths of Glory or Lolita?
Oh gosh, now I’m thinking about what would happen if the 2013 Man of Steel Superman reboot/prequel/sequel/whatever were based on Lolita. That’d be one weird superhero film.
Trois Couleurs is probably one of my favourite trilogies. (Would I get kicked off MUBI if I said Star Wars was my favourite? Haha.)
1) Rouge. Shortly after watching it, I finally realized why Amélie didn’t resonate with me—it was missing the extra something that inhabited Rouge’s every frame. And the ending is a very satisfying conclusion to the trilogy.
2) Bleu. I love Juliette Binoche and I think her performance here is quite good. However, speaking as a long-time musician, something about the way the “composers” (the in-universe composers, not Preisner) act doesn’t quite ring true for me. I can’t quite put my finger on why.
3) Blanc. I’m not sure I would have enjoyed this film had it been a stand-alone work. The plot is interesting and clever and all, but it’s strange that Kieślowski switches the protagonist’s sex for this one, and I found myself more interested in Julie Delpy’s character.
Funny, my #1 answer is exactly the same as Tony’s.
Films
1: I saw 43 2011 films and A Separation was my favourite!
2: A Separation, Melancholia, Take Shelter and Once Upon A Time In Anatolia are all worth watching.
3: Certified Copy (2010) was probably one of my favourite non-2011 films.
4: You can’t go wrong with Kiarostami’s entire back-catalogue, actually.
5: Drive is one of my favourite mainstream releases, even if only for Cliff Martinez’ super cool score.
Books & Music
1: I can’t remember if Franzen’s Freedom was released in 2010 or 2011. Either way, I think that might be my favourite.
2: Nabokov’s Lolita or Gaddis’ The Recognitions were both fantastic non-2011 reads.
3: Above.
4: If you’re into postmodern fiction, William Gaddis is criminally underrated.
5: Still feeling Dirty Projectors’ great 2009 release, Bitte Orca.
And let me just add that Orson Welles’ F For Fake and Certified Copy would make for a compelling double feature. Throw the Gaddis book in there as further reading and you’d have fodder for some interesting art discussion.
Amélie. I violently hate its saccharine portrayal of Paris, its blatant rip-off of the Trois Couleurs trilogy, and its smarmy, cutesy-piano soundtrack. I violently hate how Audrey Tautou was conditioned to look exactly like Hepburn because she’s ‘sooooo romantic’ and ‘soooooo indie’. I also violently hate to what extent people love this movie.
According to this (http://www.filmbiz.asia/news/kiarostami-advances-love), it’s “the tale of a female Japanese student who prostitutes herself to pay for her studies and finds unexpected kindness from an elderly client”. It’s also supposed to be a “continuation” (whatever that means) of Certified Copy. Not sure how that’s going to work, but I’m excited nonetheless.
von Trier’s Melancholia is by far my favourite of his works. It’s probably the Wagner.
I read something somewhere that criticized DiCaprio for having a thin, reedy voice. It just doesn’t project like the voices of the truly great actors. (At least that was the author’s point.) I think that might be a big reason why I don’t find DiCaprio very convincing. I wish Scorsese would stop picking him to star in all his projects.
@Nick Yep, I found Rooney Mara really attractive here. She was cute in a puppy-dog sort of way. Not sure if that makes any sense at all, but yep.
The plot is pretty much a disaster in Dragon Tattoo (although that’s more the author’s fault), which really makes me question why the film has to be 150 minutes long. And at times, I felt that MacBooks did more mystery-solving than their owners! But you’ve gotta love Reznor & Ross on the score once again. Every now and then there’s a de-tuned piano that creeps into a song and it’s pretty chilling. Let’s hope they have a long and fruitful film career ahead of them!
Yeah, Daniel Day-Lewis is usually in my good books.
How about Keira Knightley as one of the lesser lights of the past few years? I’ve never been convinced by her performances (need I mention the first few minutes of A Dangerous Method?). Apparently she’s starring in a Joe Wright-helmed Anna Karenina remake… yikes.
If you’re a Dirty Projectors fan, you may have heard that they’ll be releasing their next LP at some point this year. In fact, a new single, called “Gun Has No Trigger”, just dropped on their website at www.dirtyprojectors.net.
If you’re a fan (or even if you’re not), what do you think of this new-ish direction for the band?
I don’t know if it’ll be any good (in my books, Old Woody Allen > New Woody Allen), but if it’s another chance to see/hear Penelope Cruz speaking Spanish, I’m in.
I attend church, and every now and then they’ll play scenes from The Gospel of John, starring Henry Ian Cusick as Jesus (and Christopher Plummer as narrator… solid). It’s IMPOSSIBLE to take seriously because Cusick also played Desmond on the television show Lost, so every time “Jesus” speaks, I can only imagine the impossibly good-looking Desmond running his hands though his hair and saying “See in you another life, brother”.
Please don’t crucify me for admitting that I watched Lost at one point in my life. (Pun intended.)
I read the book a long, long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away — middle school!), and I was immediately disappointed by how much they had cut out in the film version. I suppose you’ve got to do some cutting when the source material’s 700 pages long though.
I really felt like nothing significant happened in Shame: Brandon’s situation doesn’t get better and it doesn’t get worse (unless you count having gay sex as being “worse”, but that viewpoint doesn’t really make any sense). What really interested me was the girl on the subway who bookended the film. There’s a glimmer of change in the way Fassbender plays those moments the second time through, but that just wasn’t enough for me.
Of course, my biggest problem with the film is the score. Emotional manipulation to the nines.
I know this has been addressed in the thread already, but I just can’t enjoy The Prestige because of the supernatural ending.
The point of a magic trick/illusion is “convincing” the audience that the magician is doing something impossible. Nobody does a show where the magic trick is walking across the stage — anybody and their dog could do that. Magicians saw people in half or find peoples’ cards out of a shuffled deck, because those things look impossible at first glance.
The audience isn’t really fooled though, because deep down inside everyone knows that the magician isn’t calling upon some mystical dark arts in order to saw the beautiful assistant in half; they’re really just manipulating a physical reality in order to fool us.
The Prestige thus fails as a magic trick/illusion. In fact, it gets the entire idea of a magic trick backwards. Instead of doing something seemingly magical but actually possible, Nolan reveals that the trick is in fact physically impossible. That’s not a magic trick anymore, that’s a fantasy — when was the last time you saw a magic show where the magician was using technology that didn’t exist in order to perform his illusions?
Now of course Nolan is playing with viewers’ expectations: he knows that people expect a trick to look impossible but to be feasible in reality, and so his magical cloning device is certainly a surprise to viewers. But in my mind it’s akin to someone ending a story with “AND IT WAS ALL JUST A DREAM!!!” It’s a cop-out ending that throws the rest of the film’s realism into the trash and repositions the film in some strange fantasy world.
The plot’s a wash for me then, meaning that I’d only watch The Prestige again for the characters or the technical aspects (neither of which really did it for me; I agree with Jazz and some of the other posters about the characters).
Society seems to be selective in choosing its targets. For instance, Chris Brown is vilified for the Rihanna assault/abuse case but Woody Allen doesn’t seem to get much heat for his, um, sketchy relationship history.
I’m not making claims about whether Brown’s or Allen’s actions are permissible and I’m certainly not equating the magnitude of their actions, but it’s interesting to note how society collectively views certain famous folk.
wrt April 20 wide-release films, I have a feeling I’ll be dragged to a showing of The Lucky One by my friends as a One Last Hurrah Before Exams Finish thing (well, given Sparks’ typical style, I think it’ll be more like One Last Extremely Emotional Moment Before Exams Finish…).
Goodreads (the book-rating and book-review site) doesn’t offer half-stars; just 1 to 5 stars. On that site, they have the following information:
1 star: didn’t like it
2 stars: it was okay
3 stars: liked it
4 stars: really liked it
5 stars: it was amazing
I think that pretty much sums it up (although the wording ought to be cleaned up). Is there a huge need for a new category between “liking” something and “really liking” something?
I know Pitchfork Media takes this to an extreme by ranking out of 100. (Technically, their reviews are out of 10, but they also use a decimal place, giving 101 possible scores.) To me, it’s a silly system — what differentiates a 7.4 album from a 7.5 album? How much better is an 8.4 album (typically a Best New Album) than an 8.3 album (not always a Best New Album)? Thus 100/101 stars seems like way too many. What about 10 (which is equivalent to five stars with the half-star option)? Here’s some food for thought: an old Netflix blog post where they explain their rationale for not implementing half-star ratings:
Personally I don’t really think the approach as laid out in the Netflix post would quite work here. The point of ratings on Netflix is to recommend similar and relevant films to watch, and I’m not sure how important that recommendation aspect is to MUBI; I don’t know how many people use MUBI’s recommendation features.
At any rate, I think half-stars would be great; I love statistics and numbers and averages and I know I would spend hours going through all my ratings and tweaking them to make sure they were perfect. But I guess I don’t find it too big a deal that half-stars haven’t been implemented here at MUBI.
I’m feeling kinda tempted to see Cabin In The Woods tomorrow with friends and kinda tempted to stay home, eat too many chips and watch an old Woody Allen flick. We’ll see…
Other films on my list for the weekend:
Fellini’s 8 ½
Alfredson’s Let The Right One In
something by Kiarostami—I know they have a couple of his bigger films at the local library; I’ll probably swing by tomorrow morning to check.
I agree that it’s all too easy to label people whose opinions differ from yours. But I wish the word “hater” would fade from the English lexicon. (Actually, I’d rather if it abruptly fell off a cliff and was never used again, starting right now…)
I don’t even understand what calling someone a “hater” accomplishes. Calling someone an idiot is an insult because an idiot once meant a mentally deficient person. Labelling someone a “hater” only means that they hate something — and for all people, there exists some thing that they hate. How is that an insult?
I assume that when people like Gleiberman use the word “hater”, they attach some extra meaning to it — exactly like what J said about Inception and “not being smart enough to understand it”. It then seems like “hater” is an insult or a put-down just because. And I don’t think that has any place in film criticism. It’s easy and cheap to call someone a hater, and while it may be harder to look at things from the "hater"’s perspective, in the end it makes for better criticism.
I don’t know where he gets this idea, and I don’t know it it’s even true. Sure, there are cynics online, but there are plenty of cynics in real life too. And if you’ve ever scrolled through a "Belieber"’s or a "Directioner"’s Twitter updates, you might find a compelling case for romantic innocence therein.
I think it would have been more fair for Gleiberman to say “I cannot abide romantic innocence”.
I like reading Reverse Shot. They’ve usually got a fairly modern take on cinema. Right now they’re doing a great Spielberg retrospective. I know the Notebook here on MUBI often links to their stuff in the Daily Briefings.
I do not much like boxing films, but I very much like Marion Cotillard, so I will definitely see Rust and Bone. (Also, I’m a sucker for a hot French accent!) I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the trailer though. Time will tell.
I will say this, however: Marion Cotillard in a wheelchair looks like it could potentially win awards.
About Elly vs. A Separation about 1 year ago
Yay, first post on MUBI!
Yes, there’re definitely similarities in style between About Elly and A Separation. If you can track down a copy, you ought to see Farhadi’s third film (About Elly is his fourth; A Separation, fifth), entitled Fireworks Wednesday. It is also thematically similar, dealing with lies, family relationships, class struggles and a bit of political commentary for good measure. These three films really seem to form a trilogy in my mind—I’ve heard it called the “Lie” trilogy somewhere—and while I don’t think Fireworks Wednesday is quite as good as the other two, it’s definitely worth watching.
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Scorsese: A Decade of Decline about 1 year ago
Well, now that he’s “officially” working with DiCaprio again, it’ll be interesting to see what comes of the Wall Street project.
I prefer Scorsese’s older films to his newer ones (I’d of course take Taxi Driver over Hugo any day), but I wonder if that isn’t just because I like to romanticize the past. I often wonder what the next generation of Scorsese viewers will think—will they start with his newer works and move backward? How will that affect their view of his filmography?
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Why does everyone on MUBI hate electronic music? about 1 year ago
There are a few things about A Clockwork Orange that bother me, but Wendy Carlos’ soundtrack pretty much makes up for them. Carlos’ synthesizer work is great.
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Will A Separation generate American interest in other Iranian filmmakers? about 1 year ago
It’s sure rekindled my interest in Iranian cinema! Lately, I’ve been watching as many Ghobadi, Kiarostami and Majidi films as I can get my hands on, and I credit that to A Separation. I think the film got Western exposure at the right time politically too.
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Zack Snyder gets compared to Stanley Kubrick about 1 year ago
I don’t see how they’re that similar. Where’s Snyder’s Paths of Glory or Lolita?
Oh gosh, now I’m thinking about what would happen if the 2013 Man of Steel Superman reboot/prequel/sequel/whatever were based on Lolita. That’d be one weird superhero film.
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Three Colors Trilogy: Which one of the three do people like best? about 1 year ago
Trois Couleurs is probably one of my favourite trilogies. (Would I get kicked off MUBI if I said Star Wars was my favourite? Haha.)
1) Rouge. Shortly after watching it, I finally realized why Amélie didn’t resonate with me—it was missing the extra something that inhabited Rouge’s every frame. And the ending is a very satisfying conclusion to the trilogy.
2) Bleu. I love Juliette Binoche and I think her performance here is quite good. However, speaking as a long-time musician, something about the way the “composers” (the in-universe composers, not Preisner) act doesn’t quite ring true for me. I can’t quite put my finger on why.
3) Blanc. I’m not sure I would have enjoyed this film had it been a stand-alone work. The plot is interesting and clever and all, but it’s strange that Kieślowski switches the protagonist’s sex for this one, and I found myself more interested in Julie Delpy’s character.
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2011 Movie Questionnaire about 1 year ago
Funny, my #1 answer is exactly the same as Tony’s.
Films
1: I saw 43 2011 films and A Separation was my favourite!
2: A Separation, Melancholia, Take Shelter and Once Upon A Time In Anatolia are all worth watching.
3: Certified Copy (2010) was probably one of my favourite non-2011 films.
4: You can’t go wrong with Kiarostami’s entire back-catalogue, actually.
5: Drive is one of my favourite mainstream releases, even if only for Cliff Martinez’ super cool score.
Books & Music
1: I can’t remember if Franzen’s Freedom was released in 2010 or 2011. Either way, I think that might be my favourite.
2: Nabokov’s Lolita or Gaddis’ The Recognitions were both fantastic non-2011 reads.
3: Above.
4: If you’re into postmodern fiction, William Gaddis is criminally underrated.
5: Still feeling Dirty Projectors’ great 2009 release, Bitte Orca.
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2011 Movie Questionnaire about 1 year ago
And let me just add that Orson Welles’ F For Fake and Certified Copy would make for a compelling double feature. Throw the Gaddis book in there as further reading and you’d have fodder for some interesting art discussion.
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What great films do you violently hate for no other reason than because you're a total idiot? about 1 year ago
Amélie. I violently hate its saccharine portrayal of Paris, its blatant rip-off of the Trois Couleurs trilogy, and its smarmy, cutesy-piano soundtrack. I violently hate how Audrey Tautou was conditioned to look exactly like Hepburn because she’s ‘sooooo romantic’ and ‘soooooo indie’. I also violently hate to what extent people love this movie.
Then again, I’m just a total idiot, so…
~~
That was cathartic.
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Trailer for Kiarostami's Like Someone in Love about 1 year ago
@Takaawesome
According to this (http://www.filmbiz.asia/news/kiarostami-advances-love), it’s “the tale of a female Japanese student who prostitutes herself to pay for her studies and finds unexpected kindness from an elderly client”. It’s also supposed to be a “continuation” (whatever that means) of Certified Copy. Not sure how that’s going to work, but I’m excited nonetheless.
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What great films do you violently hate for no other reason than because you're a total idiot? about 1 year ago
@Dutch
I agree on both counts!
von Trier’s Melancholia is by far my favourite of his works. It’s probably the Wagner.
I read something somewhere that criticized DiCaprio for having a thin, reedy voice. It just doesn’t project like the voices of the truly great actors. (At least that was the author’s point.) I think that might be a big reason why I don’t find DiCaprio very convincing. I wish Scorsese would stop picking him to star in all his projects.
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Despair on earth, and goodwill toward no man. about 1 year ago
@Nick Yep, I found Rooney Mara really attractive here. She was cute in a puppy-dog sort of way. Not sure if that makes any sense at all, but yep.
The plot is pretty much a disaster in Dragon Tattoo (although that’s more the author’s fault), which really makes me question why the film has to be 150 minutes long. And at times, I felt that MacBooks did more mystery-solving than their owners! But you’ve gotta love Reznor & Ross on the score once again. Every now and then there’s a de-tuned piano that creeps into a song and it’s pretty chilling. Let’s hope they have a long and fruitful film career ahead of them!
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Who do you think are the Worst Actors/Actresses of all time about 1 year ago
Yeah, Daniel Day-Lewis is usually in my good books.
How about Keira Knightley as one of the lesser lights of the past few years? I’ve never been convinced by her performances (need I mention the first few minutes of A Dangerous Method?). Apparently she’s starring in a Joe Wright-helmed Anna Karenina remake… yikes.
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Who do you think are the Worst Actors/Actresses of all time about 1 year ago
@Kingofpain She does look good in that costume. I’ll give you that.
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Dirty Projectors fans Unite! about 1 year ago
If you’re a Dirty Projectors fan, you may have heard that they’ll be releasing their next LP at some point this year. In fact, a new single, called “Gun Has No Trigger”, just dropped on their website at www.dirtyprojectors.net.
If you’re a fan (or even if you’re not), what do you think of this new-ish direction for the band?
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Don't Call It a Comeback: He's Been Here For Years, Is Woody Allen Popular Again? about 1 year ago
I don’t know if it’ll be any good (in my books, Old Woody Allen > New Woody Allen), but if it’s another chance to see/hear Penelope Cruz speaking Spanish, I’m in.
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Who has played the definitive Jesus on film? about 1 year ago
Haha.
I attend church, and every now and then they’ll play scenes from The Gospel of John, starring Henry Ian Cusick as Jesus (and Christopher Plummer as narrator… solid). It’s IMPOSSIBLE to take seriously because Cusick also played Desmond on the television show Lost, so every time “Jesus” speaks, I can only imagine the impossibly good-looking Desmond running his hands though his hair and saying “See in you another life, brother”.
Please don’t crucify me for admitting that I watched Lost at one point in my life. (Pun intended.)
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RAMMING SPEED! about 1 year ago
I read the book a long, long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away — middle school!), and I was immediately disappointed by how much they had cut out in the film version. I suppose you’ve got to do some cutting when the source material’s 700 pages long though.
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Can we talk about why it's bad? about 1 year ago
I really felt like nothing significant happened in Shame: Brandon’s situation doesn’t get better and it doesn’t get worse (unless you count having gay sex as being “worse”, but that viewpoint doesn’t really make any sense). What really interested me was the girl on the subway who bookended the film. There’s a glimmer of change in the way Fassbender plays those moments the second time through, but that just wasn’t enough for me.
Of course, my biggest problem with the film is the score. Emotional manipulation to the nines.
Go to Comment
Prestige: spoilers revealed! about 1 year ago
I know this has been addressed in the thread already, but I just can’t enjoy The Prestige because of the supernatural ending.
The point of a magic trick/illusion is “convincing” the audience that the magician is doing something impossible. Nobody does a show where the magic trick is walking across the stage — anybody and their dog could do that. Magicians saw people in half or find peoples’ cards out of a shuffled deck, because those things look impossible at first glance.
The audience isn’t really fooled though, because deep down inside everyone knows that the magician isn’t calling upon some mystical dark arts in order to saw the beautiful assistant in half; they’re really just manipulating a physical reality in order to fool us.
The Prestige thus fails as a magic trick/illusion. In fact, it gets the entire idea of a magic trick backwards. Instead of doing something seemingly magical but actually possible, Nolan reveals that the trick is in fact physically impossible. That’s not a magic trick anymore, that’s a fantasy — when was the last time you saw a magic show where the magician was using technology that didn’t exist in order to perform his illusions?
Now of course Nolan is playing with viewers’ expectations: he knows that people expect a trick to look impossible but to be feasible in reality, and so his magical cloning device is certainly a surprise to viewers. But in my mind it’s akin to someone ending a story with “AND IT WAS ALL JUST A DREAM!!!” It’s a cop-out ending that throws the rest of the film’s realism into the trash and repositions the film in some strange fantasy world.
The plot’s a wash for me then, meaning that I’d only watch The Prestige again for the characters or the technical aspects (neither of which really did it for me; I agree with Jazz and some of the other posters about the characters).
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Wide Release Films April 20 2012 about 1 year ago
Society seems to be selective in choosing its targets. For instance, Chris Brown is vilified for the Rihanna assault/abuse case but Woody Allen doesn’t seem to get much heat for his, um, sketchy relationship history.
I’m not making claims about whether Brown’s or Allen’s actions are permissible and I’m certainly not equating the magnitude of their actions, but it’s interesting to note how society collectively views certain famous folk.
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Wide Release Films April 20 2012 about 1 year ago
wrt April 20 wide-release films, I have a feeling I’ll be dragged to a showing of The Lucky One by my friends as a One Last Hurrah Before Exams Finish thing (well, given Sparks’ typical style, I think it’ll be more like One Last Extremely Emotional Moment Before Exams Finish…).
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Who are the best users on Mubi? about 1 year ago
I’ve gotta second PolarisDiB. I’ve only been using MUBI for about a month, but thus far I’ve remarked that his forums posts are always great.
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Why can't we use half stars? about 1 year ago
Goodreads (the book-rating and book-review site) doesn’t offer half-stars; just 1 to 5 stars. On that site, they have the following information:
1 star: didn’t like it
2 stars: it was okay
3 stars: liked it
4 stars: really liked it
5 stars: it was amazing
I think that pretty much sums it up (although the wording ought to be cleaned up). Is there a huge need for a new category between “liking” something and “really liking” something?
I know Pitchfork Media takes this to an extreme by ranking out of 100. (Technically, their reviews are out of 10, but they also use a decimal place, giving 101 possible scores.) To me, it’s a silly system — what differentiates a 7.4 album from a 7.5 album? How much better is an 8.4 album (typically a Best New Album) than an 8.3 album (not always a Best New Album)? Thus 100/101 stars seems like way too many. What about 10 (which is equivalent to five stars with the half-star option)? Here’s some food for thought: an old Netflix blog post where they explain their rationale for not implementing half-star ratings:
http://blog.netflix.com/2007/08/todd-speaks-12-stars.html
Personally I don’t really think the approach as laid out in the Netflix post would quite work here. The point of ratings on Netflix is to recommend similar and relevant films to watch, and I’m not sure how important that recommendation aspect is to MUBI; I don’t know how many people use MUBI’s recommendation features.
At any rate, I think half-stars would be great; I love statistics and numbers and averages and I know I would spend hours going through all my ratings and tweaking them to make sure they were perfect. But I guess I don’t find it too big a deal that half-stars haven’t been implemented here at MUBI.
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What are you watching this weekend? (April 13th-April 15th 2012) about 1 year ago
I’m feeling kinda tempted to see Cabin In The Woods tomorrow with friends and kinda tempted to stay home, eat too many chips and watch an old Woody Allen flick. We’ll see…
Other films on my list for the weekend:
Fellini’s 8 ½
Alfredson’s Let The Right One In
something by Kiarostami—I know they have a couple of his bigger films at the local library; I’ll probably swing by tomorrow morning to check.
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Film Critic Owen Gleiberman calls people who hate Titanic haters? about 1 year ago
I agree that it’s all too easy to label people whose opinions differ from yours. But I wish the word “hater” would fade from the English lexicon. (Actually, I’d rather if it abruptly fell off a cliff and was never used again, starting right now…)
I don’t even understand what calling someone a “hater” accomplishes. Calling someone an idiot is an insult because an idiot once meant a mentally deficient person. Labelling someone a “hater” only means that they hate something — and for all people, there exists some thing that they hate. How is that an insult?
I assume that when people like Gleiberman use the word “hater”, they attach some extra meaning to it — exactly like what J said about Inception and “not being smart enough to understand it”. It then seems like “hater” is an insult or a put-down just because. And I don’t think that has any place in film criticism. It’s easy and cheap to call someone a hater, and while it may be harder to look at things from the "hater"’s perspective, in the end it makes for better criticism.
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Film Critic Owen Gleiberman calls people who hate Titanic haters? about 1 year ago
Yeah, something doesn’t quite ring true about what Gleiberman said.
“Internet culture… cannot abide… romantic innocence.”
I don’t know where he gets this idea, and I don’t know it it’s even true. Sure, there are cynics online, but there are plenty of cynics in real life too. And if you’ve ever scrolled through a "Belieber"’s or a "Directioner"’s Twitter updates, you might find a compelling case for romantic innocence therein.
I think it would have been more fair for Gleiberman to say “I cannot abide romantic innocence”.
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Do you any interesting blogs/sites about cinema? about 1 year ago
I like reading Reverse Shot. They’ve usually got a fairly modern take on cinema. Right now they’re doing a great Spielberg retrospective. I know the Notebook here on MUBI often links to their stuff in the Daily Briefings.
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The Game - Possible Release? about 1 year ago
I have a hunch that all of Michael Douglas’ bad luck in The Game is some sort of failed pre-emptive punishment for Wall Street 2.
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Chances for Marion to win Best Actress award in Cannes, 2012 about 1 year ago
I do not much like boxing films, but I very much like Marion Cotillard, so I will definitely see Rust and Bone. (Also, I’m a sucker for a hot French accent!) I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the trailer though. Time will tell.
I will say this, however: Marion Cotillard in a wheelchair looks like it could potentially win awards.
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