(no subject)

[proximoception]

Drive seemed to me pretty bad, just another in the recent run of arted-up action movies - compare Hanna, which for some reason married the now aged rave aesthetic to the Bourne Identity premise, and The American which was beautifully photographed and strikingly moody and completely tedious and shitty. These pretty movies are awful dumb. I'm not really sure what the point of attempting dignified presentation of idealess human-squishing would be, especially at the cost of crowding out actual entertainment. I'd claim it as more narcissistic filmmaking but there seems to be an audience for it, hence perhaps it's just successful pandering? An audience I guess consisting of people who want the simple but fear it will be laughed at by someone around or inside them, so fall with relief for something that takes up trappings of complexity but is not in fact complex. So characters stare at each other, or do something one half swerve off from what you expect, and you think, gee, they have thoughts and this movie is about real, fleshy people and their human-type concerns, except not really, no.

Whenever there's such a massive praise fail I tend to assume something's happening with the cultural moment, as for example with the pure godawfulness of Gladiator: Crowe was adding some missing nutrient, for filmgoers and critics, and they gobbled him. And spat him out a few years later and seem a bit retroactively embarrassed, as they maybe also became about Braveheart and Dances with Wolves. Maybe that's what's happening here, something about the heroism? 'We' don't believe a person can be good anymore but need to...and maybe if he does enough bad, but not too bad, before he goes good, and has to do enough bad while staying good, and shuts up so we don't have to try to imagine what credible personality could do the necessary veering and just hope there is one, then we get that hero click.

But some of the praise seems to be for style, which in this case I'd just call stylizings, since there were a bunch of disconnected ones and all amounted to nothing. Is this just the knowingness trap? The film wants us to pick up that it knows it's doing things in a certain way, and we pick up that signal and are flattered to be let in on something but have no idea what it might be, but nod that yes, we totally know, and believe our own nod because we recognize one of the many movies being pointlessly, ostentatiously borrowed from - Thief, Lost Highway, even American Gigolo for some reason? Man, I have a temper today. Movie sucked though - I saw in passing someone comparing it to Mulholland Drive and got super-excited, enough to see it on a weeknight.

Comments

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

How do you decide somebody's not a narcissist filmmaker? I once saw JJ Abrams in an interview say he hired Damon Lindelof b/c he wears the same eye glasses as Abrams. Pretty much everybody making TV and movies is a narcissist, I'd guess.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Abrams is a narcissist, definitely, though I assume not a terribly unbenevolent one - he has enough empathy for some basic humor and quality control, but will never be the reason anything is great rather than derivatively exciting. Lindelof probably isn't one, eyewear aside. The only person you need to not be a narcissist is the writer, and the director where the director has enough clout where they think they can meddle with the writing, with camera or pen. Well, probably helps to have non-narcissist crews, but self-worshippers don't tend to enter those professions.

If it's widely praised but on inspection bad the spell of a narcissist is usually the explanation, I've become convinced.

[agoraphiliac.livejournal.com]

guilty! I praised its style.

I like Barthes, too.

Good thing we have nightspore in common.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I'm sure Barthes is fine when he's not ruining everything.

As for Drive, it's like criticizing junk food packaging. I'm the ashamed one.

[andalus.livejournal.com]

Just saw it. Never has a movie turned boring and shitty so quickly. I suspect that the director just lost interest when he realized nothing was coming together at all. Bronson was entertaining.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

The beginning was good, with the baseball game, in a Michael Mann kind of way. But after that what the hell people.