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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 25, 2017 8:59:48 GMT
I am not claiming these are all poor films. ("6" in my rating system means a good movie which I am pleased to have in my collection. "5" means it is worth watching at least once). Just that I rate them somewhat, or a lot, lower than most of you guys. In many cases there are clues as to why I was unimpressed. I am not looking for reasons why I am out of line. I can find them on any film buff's board. I am wondering if any of you feel the same way about any of the following movies: Stalag 17 1953 Billy Wilder 3.0 Wilder made many very good pictures, including two which rank among the best ever made in any country or decade. I expected more. Holden did not look remotely like a POW. He looked like a Hollywood Golden Boy. I found the supposed comic relief to be embarrassing schmaltz and the portrayal of both Sgt Schultz and the Russian prisoners made me squirm. Touch of Evil 1958 Orson Welles 6.0 The best parts are wonderful, but it has too many defects to rank among the greatest. Principally the hopeless miscasting of Charlton Heston. And why cover his face with shoe polish? Had Welles never seen a white Mexican? In most Latino countries the top jobs were held by blancos. The gang kidnap scenes were a failed attempt to make the film appear "with it" and appeal to that new box-office and social construct, the "teenager". And the scene where Vargas wades through the water to listen to the conversation above is ludicrous. The film only makes sense if we accept that Quinlan had once been a great, or at least effective, detective. A little more evidence of that would have justified the loyalty shown to him by Sgt Menzies and Tana. The Conformist 1970 Bernardo Bertolucci 6.0 All beautifully made and acted but I found the motivations of the various principals incomprehensible. The Ruling Class 1972 Peter Medak 3.5 Two problems here. The film was satirizing something that did not exist, at least in the 20th century, a outdated caricature of England, not the (equally imperfect) reality. For a more acute but equally absurdist satire, see O Lucky Man (1973) by Lindsay Anderson. The other problem is Peter Toole. I cannot abide "luvvies" in movies: "Luvvie" is a slang word for actor originating in British theatre, from the tendency of stage actors to call each other "love" and "darling" (apparently because when you're going from job to job it's easier than remembering people's names). The people it refers to tend to be posh and classically trained, and it connotes a certain amount of pomposity, effusiveness, sensitivity, and/or sentimentality. (from TV Tropes). The Conversation 1974 Francis Ford Coppola 3.0 Typical failed American attempt to emulate European "existentialist" cinema. Stick to what you do best, guys: guns and cannoli. Because it is about audio surveillance, it features a soundtrack that enhances every random noise which we normally screen out in our daily lives. I see why the director did that, but I have a phobia about diegetic sound in normal movies. This was like Chinese water torture for me. And the plot is crap. The guy is supposed to be reclusive and paranoid, then gives a hostile business rival, a disloyal employee, and a whore the free run of his workshop with his ultra secret equipment and tapes of his current sensitive project. Plus the murder plot makes no sense. Love Among the Ruins 1975 George Cukor 2.0 Prince Charles causes a diplomatic stir a few years back when he called the Chinese leadership "appalling old waxworks", but it fits the actors in this bore perfectly. Luvvies again. 1900 (1976) Bernardo Bertolucci 6.0 The central character (De Niro) is supposed to be apathetic and inactive. That is a hard trick to pull off yet keep the film compelling and the miscast De Niro fails. Ada (Dominique Sanda) is irritating beyond measure. Sutherland as the awkward clownish sociopath turned fascist sadist retraces his arc from the previous year's The Day of the Locust. It just takes him a whole lot longer to get there. Some wonderful scenes, but should have been edited down to two hours. The Stunt Man 1980 Richard Rush 4.5 Peter Toole. Luvvie! Thief 1981 Michael Mann 4.0 Routine heist film padded out with lots of inaction to make it look profound. Who cares about the inner angst of professional crooks? They are cockroaches. Cutter's Way 1981 Ivan Passer 3.0 Ditto with the addition of some surreal scenes. Plus drunks are boring. But I may give this one another chance. Identification of a Woman 1982 Michelangelo Antonioni 3.0 Did not understand the point of this at all. I loved his earlier films. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead 1990 Tom Stoppard 3.0 Two of my favorite screen actors (Roth and Oldman) playing at being luvvies. In reality, Shakespearean actors were not luvvies or even "artists", they were artisans plying a trade rated one step above prostitution and housebreaking. That is one of the running jokes in Shakespeare in Love (1998). It portrays the Elizabethan actors as if they were modern careerists. La Belle Noiseuse 1991 Jacques Rivette 5.0 Beautifully shot and acted. Was that the only point after four hours? Art for art's sake? Magnolia 1992 Paul Thomas Anderson 5.0 It's OK but too sentimental in parts. Open Your Eyes 1997 Alejandro Amenábar 6.0 Wonderful until the reveal: a sci-fi explanation. I don't care for sci-fi much, and I hate it being foisted on me as a genre switch to get the writers out of a hole. The Prestige 2006 Christopher Nolan 4.0 Exactly the same comment as previous movie. Plus I am sick to death of Michael Caine playing the same role in every movie for the last 20 years. He died well in Last Orders (2001). Couldn't he take a hint? (Career-wise, not personally) Fight Club 1999 David Fincher 5.0 Seems popular with testosterone-filled young men. Same comment as previous two. I was just about hanging on in there watching a psychological drama when it relapsed into sci-fi at the end. Or did it? Don't ask me! Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind 2004 Michel Gondry 5.0 Same story. Psychological drama with absurd sci-fi premise. I also find it hard to look at Jim Carrey's rubbery face in anything. He was OK in The Truman Show because he was supposed to be artificial. Never liked him in anything else except The Majestic (2001). That was sentimental too, but not his fault. Happiness 1998 Todd Solondz 4.5 Took a shower afterwards. The Fall 2006 Tarsem 5.0 Sentimental and too long. My 7-year-old liked it up to falling asleep. Taste of Cherry 2007 Abbas Kiarostami 5.5 Very disappointed after rave reviews. Hated the ending. Let The Right One In 2008 Tomas Alfredson 5.0 OK. A little thin in material. I do not like vampires. Incendies 2010 Denis Villeneuve 5.0 Great until the titillating and unnecessary ending. Villeneuve is like Spielberg, massively talented but has one eye on the box office. Spielberg adds a topping of schmaltz. In Villeneuve's case, sadism and perversion. Prisoners 2013 Denis Villeneuve 5.0 See above. Django Unchained 2012 Quentin Tarantino 5.5 I find it hard to enjoy a jolly romp about slavery, though Tarantino nearly pulls it off. I think the problem is that Foxx is too serious in the role. Someone a bit more swashbuckling to camp it up, like Samuel L Jackson did, and it might be more of an acceptable escapist fairy-tale. Mr. Turner 2014 Mike Leigh 6.0 Well-made and acted, but an opportunity lost. I learned nothing about Turner's career. And the soundtrack on my DVD is horribly fuzzy in parts so I missed some of the dialog although Turner and his cronies had the same accent as I do (Estuary English). Not sure if I just have a dud DVD. Birdman 2014 Alejandro G. Iñárritu 4.0 Luvvies again. Very recent movie so I will let it mull for a year or two and give it another try. I have viewed Fight Club twice in the theater since September 2013. I would not say that I was "disappointed," as I held no expectations going in, but I have mixed feelings about it. On both occasions, I sort of kept downgrading the movie as it went along, from "very good" to "good" to "pretty good" to just "decent." The film is fascinating in certain ways and offers many strengths, but for me, the narrative loses more and more credibility the further it goes. "Sci fi" does not strike me when I consider the movie (even the conclusion), but I see what you mean. Its popularity, I sense, stems from the film's postmodern aspects (which may ultimately go too far) and the way that it speaks to a generation of young men who indeed feel constrained and emasculated by contemporary society and corporate control.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 25, 2017 8:51:08 GMT
... sort of a dark horse: "A man's got to know his limitations." - Harry Callahan, Magnum Force (Ted Post, 1973)
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 25, 2017 8:48:20 GMT
Not sure about anything, but maybe the first one. "Here's looking at you, kid." - 75 this year "What's it all about, Alfie?" - 51 this year "Go ahead. Make my day." - 45 this yearDo you mean Clint Eastwood's line, or something else? If it is Eastwood's line, that would be thirty-four years this year, the line having occurred in the fourth Harry Callahan film, Sudden Impact (Eastwood, 1983). ... amazing how Casablanca produced two all-time classic lines, with the one that you cited and also, "Play it again, Sam."
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 25, 2017 7:22:44 GMT
Pulp Fiction is definitely better than Reservoir Dogs, which sort of served as the warm-up act for Pulp Fiction. Agreed. The interesting thing about Reservoir Dogs is that it takes place in mostly one setting, it kinda feels like a play. It's a testament to how good the acting and dialogue is, that the movie is still so entertaining. Unpopular opinion, but I thought Tarantino did it better with The Hateful Eight. I love that movie, and I think it's one of his best (top 3). I agree with you. I consider Reservoir Dogs "good" (I viewed it twice in the theater last week) and The Hateful Eight (which I viewed in the theater three times in early 2016) "very good." I considered The Hateful Eight "good" after an initial screening and then "very good" the next two times. Certainly, the film is much more impressive visually than Reservoir Dogs, and it is more sophisticated as well—quite clever in its metaphorical critique of American history. I would definitely cite The Hateful Eight as one of the ten best films among 2015 releases, and although it is not quite as outrageous as Pulp Fiction or as ingenious as Django Unchained, Tarantino manages to deliver an extremely engrossing movie that darkly mixes humor and violence in seamless fashion. I had not made the connection between Reservoir Dogs and The Hateful Eight, but you are correct—Tarantino takes his Dogs template and improves upon it with his most recent film.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 25, 2017 7:03:08 GMT
Love your notion of the film playing around with tropes and how the audience gets trapped liked the character does, London. I would agree. I would also add that the same thing happens in Bonnie and Clyde, which I know from my experience of seeing it in the theater numerous times when it was first released. The film has brilliant performances by actors working with a great script, which used humor to trap the audience in much the same way that Bonnie and Clyde were trapped in their cycle of crime, having fun for awhile until reality suddenly and violently hit them in the face. Anyone who saw it in the theater at the time of its release will know exactly what I mean. Audiences screamed with laughter, again and again, until that fateful turning point when the banker jumped on the car and was killed. Then silence. Nothing was funny after that, not for Bonnie and Clyde, not for the audience. And the face of American film was changed forever.That scene really is memorable—visually incisive with expert editing. I viewed Bonnie and Clyde in the theater in October 2013, and although the audience was not large enough to gauge any discernible reaction, I can certainly appreciate your comments. Incidentally, Bonnie and Clyde is receiving another theatrical re-release (of the two-day variety) later this year (in August) to commemorate the movie's fiftieth anniversary. I had seen Bonnie and Clyde about three times previously, on VHS or DVD, but part of what stood out to me when viewing the film in the theater three and a half years ago was the sense of a Vietnam War allegory. In effect, the film militarizes the police or turns it into a para-military force indulging in excess, rendering an analogy to Vietnam inescapable.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 23, 2017 8:41:38 GMT
I think the one quantifiable characteristic of any Arthur Penn film was his brilliance with actors. Actors are always superb in Penn films, a testament, no doubt, to his Actors Studio training. His cinematic style is fairly amorphous - ranging from the very simple ( Left-Handed Gun), to the rhapsodic (moments of elegiac/ surrealistic/ lyrical beauty in The Miracle Worker and Bonnie and Clyde), to the slightly experimental ( Mickey One). He seemed to use an obvious, "showy" cinematic style only in a deeply organic way; when it's completely in the service of the story and is precisely the best way to tell the story most meaningfully. All his films (even those not completely successful) possess a cinematic and "moral" clarity that I appreciate. He was always interested in the moral implications of his characters' actions - perhaps this is another defining characteristic of his work. I think his two best films are The Miracle Worker, which has moments of genius, and Bonnie and Clyde, which is one of the truly great, watershed American films; a masterpiece, IMO. Any other thoughts on this director and his films? The text that I placed in purple makes an excellent point, and Bonnie and Clyde is indeed a case in point. The film is quite stylized, sometimes surreal, and violently lyrical. In that kind of movie, no matter how compelling it may be on a certain level, human authenticity and emotional poignancy are often sacrificed—I would actually cite some of Stanley Kubrick's films, especially from the late sixties on, as examples of this cost. But Bonnie and Clyde is a deeply poignant, emotionally haunting film full of pathos—the lyricism and surrealism are not idle at all, and instead those wondrous qualities facilitate a surprising degree of gravitas and sensitivity. In this regard, I might analogize Penn to another director making influential (although not critically acclaimed in those days) movies around the time of Bonnie and Clyde: Sergio Leone out of Italy. Even more stylized than Penn, Leone was a deliriously operatic, hugely mythic director whose films nonetheless depicted humanity on an earthier, more grubbily realistic, and more viscerally intense level than the movies (writ large) had previously presented. On a more intimate level emotionally, director Mike Nichols was also using stylistic lyricism to display human warts, especially in The Graduate, released the same year as Bonnie and Clyde. And one could argue that director Nicholas Ray was doing something similar years earlier with such mid-fifties offerings as Johnny Guitar and Rebel Without a Cause, although he was more constrained by the edicts and stylistics of the day—even as he managed to shockingly shake off those constraints at times. Perhaps what also unites these directors is that while they were all more than capable of thematic cynicism, they were not cynical toward their protagonists—unlike many directors (Kubrick, perhaps), they did not conflate the two types of cynicism. Thus their films felt honest rather than exploitative, no matter how stylized they might have been. Of course, a failure to be cynical of one's protagonist can occasionally be a weakness, as in Penn's 1976 Western The Missouri Breaks, where the director seems to treat Marlon Brando's character with full seriousness even as that character descends into absurdity. But Penn delivered some of Hollywood's most important and iconic films in perhaps the industry's most culturally incisive era. At his best, he bridged traditionalism and revisionism—the old Hollywood and the new—in seamless fashion.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 23, 2017 8:04:28 GMT
day, and also today!
Last night I caught The Little Foxes (my all-time favorite Davis movie!), Double Indemnity, and a little known B-noir, Detour.
Today, I caught The Bad Seed, which is followed by Mildred Pierce, Gaslight, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, Little Shop of Horrors, The Birds, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Hombre, and Touch of Evil.
Tomorrow is just as good!!!!
6:30 AM crime Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
8:45 AM drama Petrified Forest, The (1935)
10:15 AM crime Key Largo (1948)
12:15 PM suspense Strangers on a Train (1951)
2:15 PM suspense Third Man, The (1950)
4:00 PM suspense Stranger, The (1946)
6:00 PM romance Casablanca (1942)
8:00 PM horror Gojira (1956)
10:00 PM horror King Kong (1933)
12:00 AM horror Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
1:30 AM horror Thing From Another World, The (1951)
3:15 AM horror X from Outer Space, The (1967)
5:00 AM horror 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957)
I'm having a great viewing time! Man, these are great lineups.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 23, 2017 7:34:29 GMT
In terms of "reliving the eighties," I would add Mel Brooks' amusing spoof Spaceballs (1986) and two films that speak to the decade's Cold War geopolitics on one level or another, Rocky IV (1985) and Firefox (1982). The latter is Clint Eastwood's worst directorial venture of the decade, but it is intriguing, it offers a look at American concerns regarding the Soviet Union, and it is nuanced in its treatment. Eastwood directed several superior movies in the decade, including Tightrope (1984), which he directed without credit, and two great films about musicians. But those stories about musicians were set in the 1930s and the 1940s/1950s, respectively, so they have nothing to do with the 1980s aside from having been made and released in that decade. Conversely, while Firefox lacks Eastwood's usual touch as a director, it offers a more mature take on the era's Cold War paranoia than most of its early-to-mid eighties rivals.
Rocky IV, meanwhile, is pure kitsch, but it constitutes a noteworthy cultural artifact from the decade and one with a highly respectable concluding message.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 23, 2017 7:22:38 GMT
Not only is Detour a wild, smashing little gem of a movie, but in some of its motifs, one can trace a lineage to films to come such as Taxi Driver (1976) and Nightcrawler (2014).
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 23, 2017 0:20:24 GMT
I don't like Hard Boiled. I prefer Pulp Fiction. Pulp Fiction is definitely better than Reservoir Dogs, which sort of served as the warm-up act for Pulp Fiction.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 22, 2017 23:32:52 GMT
John Wayne's only acting Academy Award was for his portrayal of Rooster Cogburn in "True Grit" (1969) Was this more of a Lifetime Achievement award from the Academy? One of those years where there wasn't an OUTSTANDING performance and it was the perfect time to give John Wayne an Oscar after so many years acting. He delivers a strong performance, no doubt, but still... And if so, do you know of any other instances where you think this occurred in Oscar History? ... yes, definitely, and it also showed what many people, and especially Academy members, tend to respond to. Wayne had offered much better, more nuanced or daring performances in the past— Red River (Howard Hawks, 1946), The Quiet Man (John Ford, 1952), The Searchers (John Ford, 1956), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (John Ford, 1962)—but he had received just one acting nomination (for 1949's Sands of Iwo Jima) and no trophies. So he puts on an eye patch and delivers a caricatured performance in True Grit, and people go, "That's acting." One could also argue that Wayne was better in some of his roles after True Grit, most notably in The Cowboys (Mark Rydell, 1972), which was perhaps his best film after Liberty Valence. As a man pushing retirement age whose cowboys are literally "boys," he must temper his aggressive masculine instincts. The result is a thoughtful, nuanced, balanced performance, at once stern and humane, without sentimentality —more impressive work, in my view, than what he does in True Grit.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 22, 2017 23:21:39 GMT
How exactly does Mr. Brown (Quentin Tarantino) die, and who exactly kills him? He seems to have suffered a wound to his forehead, but if that was a gunshot, should not he have died immediately?
And if anyone wants to share thoughts on the film beyond that question, feel free.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 22, 2017 23:17:19 GMT
What about Apollonia Kotero in Purple Rain?
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 22, 2017 23:09:02 GMT
I viewed 2001: A Space Odyssey in the theater last year. (I had seen it once before, in November 2003, on Turner Classic Movies.)
I liked the film—I consider it "very good." It represents a tour de force visually and technically (especially for its time), the audio-visual counterpoint is incredible, and I did not mind the sequence in question. Also, the film is extraordinarily prescient—it predicted advances in technology decades before they fully occurred.
The reason why I do not consider the film "great" has nothing to do with the narrative and more with the characters—they are pretty much two-dimensional and engendered no emotional investment on my part. Maybe that was the point, and certainly the film's focus was on the power of the machines. Still, if one were invested in the characters, perhaps that theme would have been emotionally powerful in addition to visually stunning and intellectually curious.
I still feel that for all the impressive use of technology, and all the intellectual intrigue regarding technology, that occurs in outer space, the early prehistoric sequence involving the apes may have been the best. It is so atmospheric and visceral—naturally eerie.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 22, 2017 23:00:49 GMT
I think the issue with 2001 is that Kubrick didn't know how to explain the concept well. The concept of course being of an extraterrestrial civilization guiding man to his ultimate destination -- to evolve into the "starchild" or whatever. For someone who watches 2001 for the first time and knows nothing about the story, they'll think it's just some weird art movie. And also, the notion of a stargate or a wormhole was not something that the general public was familiar with until about maybe 10 or 15 years ago. So, anybody watching the stargate sequence before that time would probably think "What's the meaning all those colored lights?". Kubrick also didn't do a good job explaining the monoliths or their purpose(s). In the "Jupiter and beyond the infinite" segment, you just see David Bowman in a pod near Jupiter and then the stargate light show automatically begins, but I think in the short story that the movie was based on, Bowman actually enters into the monolith itself. not just the short story, it is all explained in the original screenplay, but kubrick just threw it out, fortunately for him this was the LSD era and people were watching the movie on drugs so they didnt care, the posters advertising the film even encouraged this ... some people. I am sure that most of the people viewing 2001: A Space Odyssey were not on drugs.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 22, 2017 22:59:18 GMT
I thought the sequel was a much better film. I think they should burn the sequel out of respect to "2001: A Space Odyssey." What a waste of film "2010: The Year We Make Contact" was. Just crap.... never heard of that movie.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 22, 2017 22:58:05 GMT
I thought the sequel was a much better film. What was the sequel?
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 22, 2017 22:56:57 GMT
What about Harry Callahan? Or is he too much of an antihero?
What about James Bond in the (unofficial) form of Sean Connery?
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 22, 2017 22:54:18 GMT
I watched this again just to answer your question. He says some word in Sanskrit that I couldn't make out. It wasn't the word for "war" that Louise told him to ask the other linguist about about. It meant "a desire for more cows." That's why they acquiesced to to Louise's demand to be there in person to translate, she really was the best known linguist in the world. I will add that the dialogue between Whitaker and Louise could have been stronger, but I really love the contrast between the alien life and our own. The military from around the world, the fact that countries would not share information with each other to their own peril, and how the alien life, who made no threat towards us, were treated, was a very powerful message, I feel. And the movie did it by showing us, not telling us. There was no admonishment from the aliens or anyone else about the frivolity of war, or an encouragement for everyone to get together and sing Kumbaya. It just portrayed the highest life forms on Earth doing what comes natural to them, in contrast to an advanced species. Thank you, I appreciate that. I understood the point of the scene, but I kept missing what exactly the Berkeley linguist had told the Whitaker character (and which he then told Louise). Your last point is an intriguing one.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 19, 2017 9:28:47 GMT
Thank you so much for responding! interesting analysis.I did not pick up on any left wing bias, and I am right leaning, but you make a good argument for it being there. I saw the mention of the cult as something that added a bit of realism. I think if we did have a visitation like the one that happened in the film, it is very possible that something like that would happen (remember the Hale-Bopp comet cult?). I guess that I just saw them using the military as the film's antagonist, adding some conflict to the story. I also felt like it was a message about how, in comparison to an advanced civilization, our warmongering looks like a primitive behavior. Again, your argument for it being pandering and cliched is a fair one. I agree that Forrest Whitaker was under-utilized, and his scenes are one of the weaker aspects of the film. The message about love and loss is what really sold me on this film. I felt it was done in a non-patronizing and relate-able way, and really spoke about the human experience. Love, loss, and mortality are themes that are pretty universal, and I thought they were handled elegantly. I didn't find it pretentious at all, so it is so interesting to me that others did. Granted, I am not educated about film making or screen writing. I just like what I like I really loved how the aliens were portrayed, both in look and behavior. It felt real for me, and it has become one of my favorite portrayals of alien life in film. The complicated process of trying to learn their language also played real to me, and I thought how they communicated was fresh and original in the sci-fi genre. Again, thanks for the detailed and thoughtful response. If there is one thing I miss about IMDb, it's conversations like this one on all the individual move and TV boards. The concern regarding how we would communicate with aliens and try to decode their language is worthwhile, I concur. Although I obviously did not feel that Arrival did much with it beyond the surface elements, I do like the concept. (By the way, does anyone remember what the Whitaker character later stated after Louise told him to ask the Cal-Berkeley linguist for the Sanskrit word for something or the other? When the Whitaker figure meets Louise the next time, he mentions this matter, but I missed exactly what he says.) I also agree that the idea of love, loss, and whether one would relive one's life, or aspects of one's life, if one understood the tragedies to come is compelling. I just felt that these ideas did not receive a real exploration and that the narrative more or less exploited them in an inorganic and superficial manner, but I respect the fact that they worked genuinely and soulfully for you and some others. I guess that to put it another way, I sort of see two different films here—an alien blockbuster with some cursory intellectual potential regarding linguistics and also an intimate, emotional chamber piece about loss and hope. Arrival connects the two in a way that feels strained, ostentatious, and threadbare for me. Did you see director Denis Villeneuve's previous film, Sicario (2015)? Many people really seem to enjoy that movie, and I enjoyed it much more than Arrival, for sure. But although Sicario possessed some major strengths in terms of cinematography, editing, action, location shooting, and atmosphere or milieu, I ultimately considered it just "decent" because the plot amounted to a typical revenge/conspiratorial potboiler, while the movie nonetheless strained to suggest some social significance that the narrative failed to support. I feel much the same way about Arrival: the narrative mechanics are robotic and turgid, straining to suggest a transcendent meaning. On the other hand, I can see how you and others find a certain grace and humanity in some of Arrival's elements. Had those elements been situated differently, I might have enjoyed them too. In any event, I would love to see Amy Adams and Forest Whitaker in a movie where Whitaker plays a larger and more integral role; I feel that they both bring a lot of humanity and authenticity to the screen.
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