Posts by Dennis Martin6

royal trux - purple audacity #1

so long, my son 2019

It’s a three-hour intimate epic following one family from the tail end of the Cultural Revolution straight up to the present day—with a heavy focus on that recent "one-child policy" era. The whole premise involving this double tragedy—part natural disaster, part bureaucratic nightmare—is actually pretty interesting. But honestly? The movie loses all its momentum because of this unnecessarily non-linear structure. It feels like they only did that to hide the big central secret, which isn't even that much of a secret anyway. The historical stuff also feels like a collection of tropes we've seen a million times before, save for maybe one standout scene where workers are protesting mass layoffs during the shift to a market economy. Great acting across the board, but overall, the movie is a letdown.

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siamak aghaei/colin jacsen - ascending bird

Dennis Hall41 said:It should be—runs exactly 60 minutes.

It was originally released on one LP.

Dennis Hall41 said:Hex Enduction Hour

That’s not even a double album

'aviary' by Julie Holter is a killer double album 👍

The Wild Goose Lake 2019

Great trailer, but honestly? A total failure of a successor to that innovative industrial noir, Black Coal, Thin Ice. They ditched the long takes and pivoted to this flashy, elliptical editing style that only works half the time. The plot is way more banal and linear here—the predecessor had this brilliantly acted, intriguing lead tackling an obscure serial killer case while the director constantly played with us, delaying the payoff through surreal sequences and fun non-sequiturs. That whole movie was basically a masterclass in withholding information. Here, there’s zero mystery at the core. The protagonist—poorly written and even worse acted this time around—is just waiting to turn himself in, while the narrative gaps feel self-conscious and gimmicky (stuff we've seen a million times before). We don't even get those fascinating ideas like the tunnel scene in Black Coal where a decade flies by in a single shot. Even the ending misses the mark—it feels way too much like the end of Exiled, except in that movie, the payoff actually carries weight because it built a morally complex world first. They also blew it on the chance to creatively link the lake motif with the characters' aimless wandering. Liao Fan and Kwai Lun-Mei are great again, though. 👍

Six

Morgan Brown4 said:I’ve never really seen it that way, even if most of those movies are strictly American. You still have heavy hitters from France and Japan, plus some British noirs shot during that era.

As for M, you can't call it noir—it came out a good decade before the Malta Falcon, which was the real starting point.

Look, film noir pulls its roots from German Expressionism and Lang’s stuff—specifically 'Dr. Mabuse.' That's easily twenty years before Knights of Columbus even happened.

My rating for this one:

Still Life 2006

It’s basically a satire of sci-fi movies—set in this post-apocalyptic vibe along the Yangtze River, where entire villages are underwater because a massive dam project displaced over a million people. The two leads are just trying to track down their families. Beyond that personal stuff, the movie is a huge sociological look at workers from all over China pulling this superhuman shift to "tear down a 2,000-year-old city in just two years."
You've got party officials forced to enforce orders and gangsters tasked with bullying people into evacuating.
Visually? It’s bizarrely faithful to classic Chinese painting styles—lots of group portraits instead of solo shots, and this overwhelming sense of nature just "swallowing" people up, complete with UFOs popping up where you'd expect mountain immortals.

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Zhou Yu's Train 2002

It’s basically a romantic drama centered on this love triangle—if you can even call it that. The lead girl travels back and forth twice a week to see her boyfriend, some writer working on a poetry book. It’s a killer example of associative, non-linear, meta-filmic storytelling—the kind of style you just don't see in modern Asian films anymore. The camerawork is wild; it’s simultaneously epileptic and meditative, pulling from both that kinetic Hong Kong editing tradition and European art-house vibes. Those trains? They provide the visual structure and "anchor" the whole thing against scenes that are otherwise totally impressionistic and scattered.

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Seen it a few times lately, so it’s pretty fresh in my mind. One of the best movies from the nineties—no contest. 😁

There are other parallels too—mostly regarding those core themes and how they’re laid out. In both of Eggers' films, you've got these leads who build these totally artificial worlds just to fill some kind of internal void, eventually turning into complete enigmas by the end; then there's the whole identity duplication thing happening across different narrative layers, plus all three movies feature at least one central 'performance' scene, etc.

John Young84 said:anyway Dennis Martin6—got any movie recs that hit this same vibe? Something using those same weird techniques to blend fiction into a few hours of pure art... not that I'm actually 15 or anything

it kind of reminded me of some of Atom Egoyan’s early stuff, like 'The Adjuster' or 'Exotica'.

Henry Campbell5 said:What's the deal with the knives? John-suov's old man was in the military, and those tactical knives belong to Ben. Then you've got the lawyer bringing up real estate investments in Manhattan—which makes sense, since Ben’s got an apartment over there.

Good catch—I totally missed those details. 👍

fadedmason7 said:Following your logic, you could argue that Ben's murder is basically just a hit carried out by John-suov's literary alter ego—just a cold-blooded revenge served up right inside the author's own imagination.

If the mods would just be decent enough to move this discussion to the right sub—then we could actually get somewhere. The topic.Alright, let's not clog up this thread. 🙂

Spoilers.

Yeah, that’s exactly where my logic is headed. At the end of the day, both Ben and Amy are just different sides of the author's own personality—sides he eventually decides to kill off. We see Ben's murder happen right in front of us, while Amy basically vanishes from the movie after John loses his cool and starts tearing into her with those insults. After that? She's gone. Just completely wiped from the picture.

All three characters share these overlapping, bleeding traits—it's almost weird. You’ve got Ben, who's supposedly this killer and greenhouse arsonist, while John is the only one we actually see pulling the trigger or trying to torch the place (though he ends up burning down a car instead). Then there's John—this passive observer who somehow doubles as a writer and the only guy prone to these total psychotic, rage-filled outbursts—calling Amy names, the greenhouse thing, the murder, the car fire at the end... you get the idea. Then you have Amy, who went under the knife for plastic surgery, while Ben spends his time "beautifying" his victims. Amy does mime, and John is just an obsessive masturbator. It’s just a massive pile of correlated traits that feel like they all crawled out of one single imagination—a mind split into different personas. Even when we first meet Ben, he arrives from Africa—coming straight out of that imaginary "other" world.

I’m not buying the idea that only two scenes are ambiguous. When you’ve got characters this "quantumly" undefined—totally fluid—the whole linear narrative starts to implode. Take that penultimate writing scene, for instance. It could just as easily drop right after the murder at the end. Or maybe stick it in the first third, right after the sex scene. Hell, it could even be the opening shot before he even meets Amy—just some dreamlike composite. Same goes for the scene at his dad's house and those sexual fantasies at her apartment. Honestly? John is basically just a composite of three different people anyway.

The whole thing feels like one fever dream cooked up by some incredibly lonely, sexually frustrated mind. Maybe someone else wants to dive into the deep psychoanalytic stuff, but what’s wild to me is how the parents act as these totally static, unchanging archetypes compared to that unstable trio of main characters. You hear about the dad being this raw, unapologetic guy back in his prime, yet now he's just getting judged for physically accosting someone. And the mother? She's framed as selfish and detached throughout his childhood, and when we finally meet her in the flesh, she hasn't changed a bit. Still the same.

Look, I’m not saying the interpretation is a stretch—there’s plenty of evidence there if you actually bother to look. But let's be real: if this were some pretentious French film, they would've thrown in at least one scene explicitly playing with metatextuality, probably loaded with a healthy dose of Barhes or Deleuze quotes just to feel important. 😁 Thank God "Boeing" isn't actually that kind of movie.

There’s actually this one scene that hits similar vibes—when John and Ben trade stories. The first guy drops this totally standard tale about a rough childhood—it's realistic, follows a straight line, and wraps up with that predictable emotional payoff. Then the second guy starts talking about burning down a greenhouse, but the whole thing is non-narrative, irrational, and offers zero actual insight. Ben doesn't even have a "reason" for setting the place on fire; he’s just following some weird "morality of nature." It's the perfect contrast: you've got a realistic story used to explain a life versus Ben’s non-representational, mystical vision about how impossible it is to truly grasp reality. To me, that’s exactly what the movie is doing. Don't get me wrong, there’s class commentary and sociological stuff in there, but it’s all secondary—basically just background noise at best.

fadedmason7 said:@goldenhound32/">@@goldenhound32: (Spoilers) Based on how the rich are portrayed—they’re either total psychopaths like Ben or just indifferent jerks who couldn't care less about his girlfriends' fates. Calling it social realism might be a stretch, I'll give you that, but the movie is definitely playing to the populist crowd. Amy is poor and uneducated, sure, but she has "soul" and does mime, whereas all of Ben's friends are just shallow hedonists. Even the mom is a villain because she ditched John and his dad for consumerist junk (that phone scene). Etc.

@Dennis Martin6/">@@Dennis Martin6: Read your post on the thread. You're reading way too much into this flick—you're basically hallucinating Schrödinger's cat at this point. 😁 As far as I recall—I saw this in a theater a few days ago, so I'm not even gonna double-check—both of those controversial scenes are clearly marked as the protagonist's dream.

spoilers

That burning greenhouse scene? That's the whole movie's modus operandi right there: the kid is John watching his dad burn his mom's stuff after she bailed, which he talks about with Ben earlier. But the director shows us a burning greenhouse instead of clothes. Ben's story about greenhouses bled into John's memory—a real past event gets distorted through John's neurotic present-day consciousness. That's the director's playbook for the entire film: the idea that Ben is a psychopath is just an assumption based on the guess that he killed Amy and dumped her body in a lake, but none of that actually happens on screen. There is zero material evidence in the film to back that up. The only person we're 100% sure is a killer is John at the end.

The movie isn't about "rich vs. poor"—that's just a populist way to read it. It's actually about that gap between what the director suggests and how the viewer interprets it. Ben is basically Gatsby from that famous Fitzgerald novel, serving as our link to this vendetta-driven world. Amy is the girl who becomes unrecognizable after plastic surgery, using mime to simulate a new reality (this has nothing to do with having a "soul"). John is the writer crafting the story about these characters. The interaction between the three plays out within a space of constant propaganda over the loudspeakers—a sign of the artificially constructed reality and life the protagonist inhabits.

goldenhound32 said:@fadedmason7/">@@fadedmason7
What do you mean by Boeing being "heavy"?

Nah, not even close. The interpretation is totally off base—those scenes aren't explicitly labeled as dreams (nothing in the movie is ever definitively marked), and the whole thing has zero to do with socialist realism. That final scene isn't an overstatement either—it just completely flips everything you thought you knew up to that point. Period.

At the end of the month, an indie theater over in Seattle is running a massive Koreeda retrospective—including his latest flick. 👍

link

Winner of the IFIP prize at this year's Cannes festival. John is a guy in his twenties working as a delivery driver who runs into Amy, a girl he knew back when they were kids—though he hasn't given her a second thought in years. After she reminds him he used to be pretty brutal about her looks (which John doesn't even remember), this stunning woman starts leading him on, kicking off a sudden, intense relationship. But then Amy asks John for a favor: while she’s traveling through Africa, he needs to watch her cat. John says yes, obviously, even though he starts questioning if she actually cares about him—especially once Amy gets back from her trip with Ben, this mysterious guy who happens to be her new (wealthy) friend.

The latest film from modern classic Lee Chang-dong, based on a short story by Murakami. Even though it's an adaptation, 'Burning' feels more like a spiritual sequel to his previous masterpiece, 'Poetry'. In that one, you had an elderly woman trying to make sense of a brutal crime committed by her teenage grandson. In this movie, that grandson's generation has grown up and now they're front and center.

Both films basically suggest that reality is warped—filtered through the symbolic consciousness of our surrogate detectives, who all happen to be artists (the grandma writes Poetry, John writes novels). Both 'Poetry' and 'Burning' feature leads digging through areas of psychological ambiguity and following trails—which leads to some wild genre shifts, like that killer lake scene in 'Burning'. Plus, themes of class struggle and social hierarchy are everywhere—here, it's tied directly to the pathology of a somewhat unstable, unpredictable protagonist.
So, are Amy and Ben just characters from a novel? Just shadows cast by the lead? Who vanished into the well, and who burned in the greenhouse? Is the cat alive or dead? 😬

(Probably the best film of last year for my taste)

Ashley Grant66 said:a little spoiler here

...aside from that police bit, we've got that scene where we see how much the mom is neglecting her kid—which was already pretty clearly implied throughout the whole movie. why do we even need such a basic scene now? 🙄

Yeah, that scene is totally redundant. Koreeda edits his own stuff and should’ve been way more ruthless here. On the flip side, I actually dug how he cut the final shot. 😁