This budding trend of playing around with subtitles rather than considering them a neutral tool is very annoying. If you don’t translate something (in a common , modern, language) you are not “denying us information” , you are splitting your audience (which is nowadays always global) into two parts, of those who do and do not comprehend it. If the experience of comprehending or not comprehending is of any significance, this makes no sense, you’re basic declaring that this movie isn’t for German speakers (or alternatively, not for everyone else ). If it’s not actually significant then it’s a stupid , distracting gimmick. I blame Spielberg for starting this nonsense with not translating the substantial Spanish bits in the new west side story, and doing that for English audiences only (subtitles in other languages cover both English and Spanish !). As if movies weren’t in deep s_t already. Blah.
"Another nice touch, I thought, was the decision to use untranslated German when Lydia is speaking during rehearsal.....But we are denied comprehension. At other times, German dialogue is translated via subtitles, but at the key moment when we might see the genius at work, our comprehension is withdrawn."
I hope that these passages will be reshot in English for the audiences in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein, so that they are not cheated of the powerful cinematic effect of having their "comprehension" withdrawn and denied.
On second thought, better have it reshot in something other than English, since everyone in those countries can understand it. Nahuatl would provide the cinematic impact to a larger audience.
After spending so much time defending Matt from fools and radicals in the Twitter-verse, I feel betrayed by this shockingly Bad Take on Thor: Love & Thunder! That movie was BAD. I like Guns N Roses LESS today because of how bad that movie was. (Christian Bale did a fine job though.)
Here’s why Love & Thunder didn’t work for me like Ragnarok did. In Ragnarok there’s a funny planet (where Jeff Goldblum is king) and a serious planet (Asgard). So the funny stuff in no way feels like it’s undermining the serious stuff, and when Thor comes back to Asgard he’s ready to complete the hero’s journey. In L&T, on the other hand, every scene is at risk of being undercut by some Waititi irreverence. For instance, we need to think Gorr is a serious bad dude, so Sif gets her arm cut off by him…but there Thor is, joking about her severed arm. If the movie was just a send-up that would be fine, but the Jane stuff and the kid stuff is supposed to be straight. It’s just a mess, unfortunately.
I'm oddly heartened by how many commenters found the unsubtitled Spanish of West Side Story off-putting. I get that it's true to the Spanglish spoken by real Puerto Rican immigrants, but honestly it makes the movie pretty unintelligible if you yourself don't speak the language. And it's clear that the film is actively trolling the audience on this front: everyone in the movie (the Jets, the cops, Anita) are constantly demanding that the Sharks speak English, and they comply briefly, but two lines later it's back to Spanish.
You can call it a "bold and pointed choice" as A.A. Dowd does in his review, but it's like Nolan and his increasingly incomprehensible dialogue being drowned out by the score: at the end of the day filmmakers need to be asking themselves how important it is that their audience is able to understand what is being said.
I don't want to keep harping on this point, but I do have one more thing to say: if you're like me and you grew up here you probably learned Spanish as a second language in school, y pues, si hablas un poquito, puedes entenderla, más o menos. But this film is about **immigrants**, and if you're like my friend who I watched this with, who came to America from China and doesn't speak a lick of Spanish, you kinda get the feeling that the film wasn't made for him and doesn't care whether he liked it one way or the other, and that does feel a little ironic to me.
Honestly, unless there really is something cinematic about the visuals, sound or action – so specifically visually artful films like Barry Lyndon, or the Tree of Life, or more conventional epics like Dune or Top Gun or Avatar – there's just no reason to go to the cinema. I really want to see Tár, but I'd much prefer to just watch it at home than at the theatre, and that's what I'll wait for. I don't really see a space for those kinds of movies in the cinema in the long run – and I think that's true of the vast majority of movies, both mainstream and arthouse.
Everything Everywhere All At Once was my movie of the year. I watched it with my wife and she had an incredibly powerful emotional reaction to it. It lead to a deep discussion about mothers and daughters, cultural and generational immigrant issues and the different kinds of love we experience. It was one of those films that I think brought us closer together in some way. So my reasons for loving it are very personal but art is a personal thing.
MY put together a great list and I’m going to watch Not Okay now.
I think the problem with the Elvis movie is, in fact, that it’s ahistorical but not for the reasons Matt gives (which are good reasons to be ahistorical). The problem is that the real Elvis isn’t an interesting person. Elvis is a professional who does the singing for a business. The missing subtext of his Las Vegas residency is that big bands like that are good back ups for people who can’t really play their instrument. The same is true for, say, Bob Dylan and Brittany Spears who are bringing something else (song writing and dancing), but Elvis is mostly just brings a famous name in then novel format. The movie is about a dreamy, highly motivated artist but he never pretended to be that. The movie just isn’t about Elvis, it’s about a sort of self-image rockers like to have post-beatles, when the leve of projected artistry needed for rock and roll ramps up.
Gonna put in a good word for "Banshees of Inisherin". Of course unfortunately my modern mindset, two of the first thoughts both my wife and I had when started watching the movies was a) "I really wan to visit this area they shot this movie and b) "these working class cottages the characters live in are probably now worth over a million dollars".
But as a fable about the absurdity that was the Irish Civil War, I really thought it worked well.
This is fun! I liked it a lot. More people should talk about movies because movies are good.
Slight correction, Jim Cameron uses motion capture, not stop motion. Stop motion is what Ray Harryhausen, Henry Selick, and sometimes Wes Anderson do. Motion capture is dots and computers, stop motion is puppets and still cameras.
Gonna need a piece breaking down the economic and ethical implications of room-temperature conductor unobtanium and whale longevity juice amrita. Where are the EA people when we need them?
Great list, generally, and even more evidence that I really ought to get around to Tár.
That having been said, I thought Love and Thunder was awful. Abysmal. It was kind of a kick in the face to Ragnarok, which balanced (a ton of) comedy very well with the storyline, whereas I thought L&T just looked like Waititi completely let off his leash, unedited, with a result that seemed like it couldn’t decide whether it was trying to capture the magic of Ragnarok or trash it for humorous effect. The storyline and effects were half-baked at best (and the CGI goat scream was cringy the first time, let alone the 5th).
Compare all of this to Waititi’s earlier work, and I think it’s pretty clear how much he benefits from working within the constraints of a smaller budget and some good editing. Hunt for the Wilderpeople and What We Do in the Shadows are amazing little films with a ton of heart that balance humor with genuine commitment to the storyline, even when it gets absurd. Ragnarok had glimpses of that same throughline. Love and Thunder never did.
For me, the recent trend in films, especially "serious" films like Tar," is to focus a lot of attention on the filmmaking and much less on the story. (Actually, I think the same is true of a lot of contemporary newspaper and magazine feature writing.) Too bad -- I think a film should tell a story so that the audience can be engaged and, if possible, lose yourself in it. Instead, we get many films (like Tar, also Glass Onion, many others) that constantly focus the audience's attention on this or that cinematic effect, which as often as not increases confusion rather than clarity. So my nomination for best film of the year is The Duke -- a really terrific satirical comedy, perhaps the only movie in recent decades that follows the great tradition of Ealing comedies from the 1950s England. Beautifully done, beautifully cast, with a point of view about British society. Not highly promoted, but who cares?
Thanks for this -- I'll be sure to check some of them out (those I haven't seen, that is). I gotta say... as a lifelong film lover, I am very down on the current state of cinema. I'm not sure if that's because I'm approaching middle age and it's starting to show, but I *kindasorta* don't think so.
I got into movies during high school, at the height of 1990s indie cinema -- the *new* "New Hollywood." The CGI extravaganzas that film the movie theaters these days don't speak to me. I find most of the writing to be subpar and despite the vast sums spent on special effects, the output is visually uninteresting. I have not seen TAR yet -- I'm looking forward to it -- but I gotta say, even though there films I saw that I thought were good, literally NOTHING I saw this year was better than anything I watched on the Criterion Channel.
I want to support the local theaters, but it's tough. For the most part, they project digitally rather than on actual film. And not to be a snob, but *I* project digitally at home -- I've got a 4k projector. I can get a similar presentation and immersive theater experience without having the movie interrupted by theater talkers. And then I can watch movies that I'd prefer seeing, rather than what Hollywood's been offering ever since the near-death of the mid-budget movie.
This budding trend of playing around with subtitles rather than considering them a neutral tool is very annoying. If you don’t translate something (in a common , modern, language) you are not “denying us information” , you are splitting your audience (which is nowadays always global) into two parts, of those who do and do not comprehend it. If the experience of comprehending or not comprehending is of any significance, this makes no sense, you’re basic declaring that this movie isn’t for German speakers (or alternatively, not for everyone else ). If it’s not actually significant then it’s a stupid , distracting gimmick. I blame Spielberg for starting this nonsense with not translating the substantial Spanish bits in the new west side story, and doing that for English audiences only (subtitles in other languages cover both English and Spanish !). As if movies weren’t in deep s_t already. Blah.
"Another nice touch, I thought, was the decision to use untranslated German when Lydia is speaking during rehearsal.....But we are denied comprehension. At other times, German dialogue is translated via subtitles, but at the key moment when we might see the genius at work, our comprehension is withdrawn."
I hope that these passages will be reshot in English for the audiences in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein, so that they are not cheated of the powerful cinematic effect of having their "comprehension" withdrawn and denied.
On second thought, better have it reshot in something other than English, since everyone in those countries can understand it. Nahuatl would provide the cinematic impact to a larger audience.
After spending so much time defending Matt from fools and radicals in the Twitter-verse, I feel betrayed by this shockingly Bad Take on Thor: Love & Thunder! That movie was BAD. I like Guns N Roses LESS today because of how bad that movie was. (Christian Bale did a fine job though.)
Here’s why Love & Thunder didn’t work for me like Ragnarok did. In Ragnarok there’s a funny planet (where Jeff Goldblum is king) and a serious planet (Asgard). So the funny stuff in no way feels like it’s undermining the serious stuff, and when Thor comes back to Asgard he’s ready to complete the hero’s journey. In L&T, on the other hand, every scene is at risk of being undercut by some Waititi irreverence. For instance, we need to think Gorr is a serious bad dude, so Sif gets her arm cut off by him…but there Thor is, joking about her severed arm. If the movie was just a send-up that would be fine, but the Jane stuff and the kid stuff is supposed to be straight. It’s just a mess, unfortunately.
Surprised Everything Everywhere All At Once didn't make it here
>part of a big boost to woman directors after the 2012 iteration of the list was criticized for featuring almost no women.
does the identity of a movie's director change the aesthetic quality of the film?
I'm oddly heartened by how many commenters found the unsubtitled Spanish of West Side Story off-putting. I get that it's true to the Spanglish spoken by real Puerto Rican immigrants, but honestly it makes the movie pretty unintelligible if you yourself don't speak the language. And it's clear that the film is actively trolling the audience on this front: everyone in the movie (the Jets, the cops, Anita) are constantly demanding that the Sharks speak English, and they comply briefly, but two lines later it's back to Spanish.
You can call it a "bold and pointed choice" as A.A. Dowd does in his review, but it's like Nolan and his increasingly incomprehensible dialogue being drowned out by the score: at the end of the day filmmakers need to be asking themselves how important it is that their audience is able to understand what is being said.
I don't want to keep harping on this point, but I do have one more thing to say: if you're like me and you grew up here you probably learned Spanish as a second language in school, y pues, si hablas un poquito, puedes entenderla, más o menos. But this film is about **immigrants**, and if you're like my friend who I watched this with, who came to America from China and doesn't speak a lick of Spanish, you kinda get the feeling that the film wasn't made for him and doesn't care whether he liked it one way or the other, and that does feel a little ironic to me.
Honestly, unless there really is something cinematic about the visuals, sound or action – so specifically visually artful films like Barry Lyndon, or the Tree of Life, or more conventional epics like Dune or Top Gun or Avatar – there's just no reason to go to the cinema. I really want to see Tár, but I'd much prefer to just watch it at home than at the theatre, and that's what I'll wait for. I don't really see a space for those kinds of movies in the cinema in the long run – and I think that's true of the vast majority of movies, both mainstream and arthouse.
Everything Everywhere All At Once was my movie of the year. I watched it with my wife and she had an incredibly powerful emotional reaction to it. It lead to a deep discussion about mothers and daughters, cultural and generational immigrant issues and the different kinds of love we experience. It was one of those films that I think brought us closer together in some way. So my reasons for loving it are very personal but art is a personal thing.
MY put together a great list and I’m going to watch Not Okay now.
I think the problem with the Elvis movie is, in fact, that it’s ahistorical but not for the reasons Matt gives (which are good reasons to be ahistorical). The problem is that the real Elvis isn’t an interesting person. Elvis is a professional who does the singing for a business. The missing subtext of his Las Vegas residency is that big bands like that are good back ups for people who can’t really play their instrument. The same is true for, say, Bob Dylan and Brittany Spears who are bringing something else (song writing and dancing), but Elvis is mostly just brings a famous name in then novel format. The movie is about a dreamy, highly motivated artist but he never pretended to be that. The movie just isn’t about Elvis, it’s about a sort of self-image rockers like to have post-beatles, when the leve of projected artistry needed for rock and roll ramps up.
Gonna put in a good word for "Banshees of Inisherin". Of course unfortunately my modern mindset, two of the first thoughts both my wife and I had when started watching the movies was a) "I really wan to visit this area they shot this movie and b) "these working class cottages the characters live in are probably now worth over a million dollars".
But as a fable about the absurdity that was the Irish Civil War, I really thought it worked well.
This is fun! I liked it a lot. More people should talk about movies because movies are good.
Slight correction, Jim Cameron uses motion capture, not stop motion. Stop motion is what Ray Harryhausen, Henry Selick, and sometimes Wes Anderson do. Motion capture is dots and computers, stop motion is puppets and still cameras.
Can’t wait for 2023’s movies!
Gonna need a piece breaking down the economic and ethical implications of room-temperature conductor unobtanium and whale longevity juice amrita. Where are the EA people when we need them?
Great list, generally, and even more evidence that I really ought to get around to Tár.
That having been said, I thought Love and Thunder was awful. Abysmal. It was kind of a kick in the face to Ragnarok, which balanced (a ton of) comedy very well with the storyline, whereas I thought L&T just looked like Waititi completely let off his leash, unedited, with a result that seemed like it couldn’t decide whether it was trying to capture the magic of Ragnarok or trash it for humorous effect. The storyline and effects were half-baked at best (and the CGI goat scream was cringy the first time, let alone the 5th).
Compare all of this to Waititi’s earlier work, and I think it’s pretty clear how much he benefits from working within the constraints of a smaller budget and some good editing. Hunt for the Wilderpeople and What We Do in the Shadows are amazing little films with a ton of heart that balance humor with genuine commitment to the storyline, even when it gets absurd. Ragnarok had glimpses of that same throughline. Love and Thunder never did.
For me, the recent trend in films, especially "serious" films like Tar," is to focus a lot of attention on the filmmaking and much less on the story. (Actually, I think the same is true of a lot of contemporary newspaper and magazine feature writing.) Too bad -- I think a film should tell a story so that the audience can be engaged and, if possible, lose yourself in it. Instead, we get many films (like Tar, also Glass Onion, many others) that constantly focus the audience's attention on this or that cinematic effect, which as often as not increases confusion rather than clarity. So my nomination for best film of the year is The Duke -- a really terrific satirical comedy, perhaps the only movie in recent decades that follows the great tradition of Ealing comedies from the 1950s England. Beautifully done, beautifully cast, with a point of view about British society. Not highly promoted, but who cares?
Thanks for this -- I'll be sure to check some of them out (those I haven't seen, that is). I gotta say... as a lifelong film lover, I am very down on the current state of cinema. I'm not sure if that's because I'm approaching middle age and it's starting to show, but I *kindasorta* don't think so.
I got into movies during high school, at the height of 1990s indie cinema -- the *new* "New Hollywood." The CGI extravaganzas that film the movie theaters these days don't speak to me. I find most of the writing to be subpar and despite the vast sums spent on special effects, the output is visually uninteresting. I have not seen TAR yet -- I'm looking forward to it -- but I gotta say, even though there films I saw that I thought were good, literally NOTHING I saw this year was better than anything I watched on the Criterion Channel.
I want to support the local theaters, but it's tough. For the most part, they project digitally rather than on actual film. And not to be a snob, but *I* project digitally at home -- I've got a 4k projector. I can get a similar presentation and immersive theater experience without having the movie interrupted by theater talkers. And then I can watch movies that I'd prefer seeing, rather than what Hollywood's been offering ever since the near-death of the mid-budget movie.