it’s not as odd as it sounds…
there are a few movie directors i really trust… and a handful of people whose taste in movies i trust…
so, let’s say my friend jennifer tells me i absolutely must see The Unbearable Lightness of Being or Pieces of April or Garden State… ok, i trust her taste – she has good taste… she knows my taste – she loves Silence of the Lambs and i don’t, i love American Beauty and she doesn’t… she knows me well enough to be pretty accurate about what i will like and, if she says i will love some film, i trust her…
AND SINCE I TRUST HER, I DON’T WANT TO KNOW A THING…
just give me the title, i don’t want to know what it is about, i want to go in completely clear minded… i don’t even want to know if it is a comedy, romance, western, nothin’, i trust you – just give me the title…
and there are some directors that i have seen enough of their work to know they do good, pretty much every time… so, i don’t want to know a thing…
Darren Aronofsky, PT Anderson, the Coen brothers are three great mainstream examples… i have pretty much loved everything they have done, so, when i know there is a new film coming, man… i spend month avoiding reviews, dodging trailers, steering clear of conversations, etc…. it is really hard sometimes…
of course, within a year, all three let me down… The Fountain, There Will Be Blood, and No Country For Old Men really left me scratching my head… they all deserve more viewings – i never make up my mind about a well-made film after only one viewing, but, i unreservedly love Aronofsky’s previous two films, and only PT Anderson’s Hard Eight was less than breathtaking – his others were nearly perfect, and while i would not say the Coens acheive perfection on a regular basis, i always like their films much more on a first viewing than i did NCFOM…
i will add that Pixar really let me down during the same time period, too, with Ratatouille… sure, it was beautiful, but, the hair-control thing stretched credulity to a breaking point and i thought the story as a whole was kind of insipid… weakest Pixar offering ever, i said at the time and still do… but, i still avoid any info about every Pixar film and they more than made up for it with Wall-E, which is nothing short of a masterpiece…
imagine if you went to Spiderman (blech) and had no idea what the movie was about… or Wall-E or Alien or The Notebook… i didn’t know anything about From Dusk ’til Dawn when i first saw it and nothing could have prepared me for the last half :P
annnnyway, there are so many films/movies out there that i know all about, i read the review sites, i hang out at the message boards and read the discussion, i listen to the podcasts, sure… but, there are the people who i trust and i try to do the impossible with their work and know absolutely nothing, but life is too short and popular media is too pathetic to “blind buy” everything, which is why i am always keeping my eye out for directors i can trust and people whose taste i really trust…
“What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.” – W. H. Auden
yeah, that’s the stuff Terra and i watch on our “slumber party night” on friday nights – movies to eat junk food to… when i know i have a trusted source of exceptions to the rule, i want as pure an experience as possible…
so, i haven’t lost all trust for Aronofsky, i’ll still go see The Wrestler (and i’ve avoided finding out anything), but as i said on twitter a little bit ago, he needs to win my heart back, i’m going to be guarded after what he did on our third date… and i know i’ll like There Will Be Blood a lot more the second time… as for No Country For Old Men, some Coens films only work once you know the rules of the universe the film takes place in… and i could write a whole lot about that… i even really like The Ladykillers – the one no one else does, it seems – but, i had to see it a few times and get comfortable in the setting before the characters made much sense to me… and that could describe most of their films… they create self-contained mini-universes and, if you expect the rules of the real world to apply, the films don’t make sense… sure, all art does this to some extent, but, the Coens are one (of many) example of this idea taken to a sky-high extreme…
the thing that bugs me, i guess is that i didn’t see any juice in NCFOM… let me explain… i said i like The Ladykillers, but it took me a few viewings… while i didn’t like the film, i liked some of the moments and a lot of the dialogue… i kept putting it on while i cleaned house and such, just to catch those things enough times to really get them in my mind, since i had every expectation that i wasn’t going to see the movie again after these few viewings…
see, i was sucking the juice out of the orange and then was going to throw the orange itself away…
but, next thing i knew, i loved the movie, even though that wasn’t my intention…
so, when i watched No Country For Old Men, there was no juice to make me want to come back and suck out… i can’t think of anything i want to go back and see for fear i never will again… that being the case, it may not get the chance to grow on me like The Ladykillers and a couple of their others have…
but, i will still go see their new one, Read Before Burning…
when did this turn into a post about the Coen brothers???
possibly related posts:
- Coens in the ‘querque!
- LifeStream for 2008-10-28
- march movies
- Follow the music… August Rush
- How Film Is Transferred to Video
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begs the question: moreso than a talking rat who can cook???
yes…
you walk into the theater signing a contract that you will accept a talking rat who can cook… and sure, we can let him get struck by lightning and survive, ok…
but, even the talking rat thing was explained within the universe of the film… we were clearly shown that they were NOT speaking english and therefore humans could not understand them… in one scene, we are shown that their speaking was heard as squeaking by humans…
so, they knew it was best to explain themselves…
therefore, i am at a loss to understand how they thought we were going to believe a rat could control a human by pulling his hair… i could even have bought it if it was just a signalling system used that the kid would thereby know what the rat wanted him to do… but, no, it was made completely clear in the film that the response by the kid was involuntary…
this is a large part of what killed the movie for me… to believe the story, i was required to believe something that did not make any sense whatsoever with no warning whatsoever… AND, it goes against what we have traditionally become accustomed to in fantasy stories… there are countless talking animal movies, and probably almost as many where the animals are doing human things, perhaps even in the human’s world…
but, this hair thing has no precedent – it is just ridiculous…
there were a few little things that also bugged me in the film – things that stretched credulity – but that happens all the time in movies, that’s not the issue… the issue is that this was a major part of the story… get someone who has never seen it and tell them about it… “ok, so there’s this rat, remy, and he lives under paris and has a taste for gourmet food – a RAT with a taste for gourmet food” and just keep telling the outline version and then watch their reaction when you get to the hair-pulling part… even if it is minor, there WILL be one…
anyway, now i’m ranting…
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