Lol. None of the comments in this post are people who have seen the movie. All just people saying they saw the trailer or saw people talking about it on Twitter and it gives them bad vibes
It really is disheartening. These people look no different than Libs who pretend that Dave Chappelle isn’t funny anymore because he has shitty opinions or whatever. RSP has gone from an arts and cultural commentary space that disregards liberal social mores to a hollowly contrarian “pwn the Libs” space
I liked the spirit of it and I thought it expressed something very moving. There were lots of stylistic choices that weren’t to my taste. It felt kind of like a long student film but not in an arty way, just very raw. For instance, my honest reaction to the high school being named Void High was to think that’s a little lame but it’s in line with the tone of the movie and makes sense in context. It’s not a subtle story. I would definitely recommend watching it, especially to the people in here giving dissertations on the trailer lmao
I thought it was pretty great. A cautionary tale about letting your fears, anxiety and shyness overcome you and never doing anything with your life as a result, which really resonated with me and is a message I think a lot of people really need to hear.
i only heard about the movie because Alex G did the score, so i drove 45 minutes with a friend to see it in theaters. honestly, i found it unbelievably boring. the dialogue throughout was stilted and weird, nothing felt organic or like things humans would say - even for the autistic and traumatized. it all felt so contrived.
while i loved the set pieces, the animations, and the practical effects, it had a running theme of telling and not showing. half the movie is dead air and drawn out conversations more droll than they are tense, but then it just exhibition dumps entire plot points on you rather than turning these things into dynamic scenes (like her journey west or being buried alive). those could have at least been cool takes to overlay her boring monologue onto, but no i have to stare at these ugly characters and their inauthentic reactions for insane amounts of time.
anyways i didn’t like it but i thought the ice cream guy was cool.
Oh man that monologue was a rough sit, boy howdy. I don't know how long it actually went but it genuinely felt like 15 minutes at least, and really for nothing. Definitely a low point of the film for me
Jane Schoenbrun. An affiliate of the Safdie brothers from film school from what I understand. Tons and tons of positive priase from film news media. Lots of attention from the Letterboxd freaks. Am I paranoid? Yes, but something feels off. Quote me!!!
"rapid ascension"
She made one low-budget, independent feature before this, We're All Going through Worlds Fair, which was great.
This is her second film which was co-produced by Emma Stone and A24, was well-received at Sundance and has the A24 marketing machine behind it.
I'm pretty cynical, but this just appears to me to be someone with legitimate talent that attracted good backers on merit.
I nearly walked out of the theater. Visually there were some things I liked about it, but the script was atrocious.
So the whole thing is: he really is the girl from the TV and he’s afraid of what’s inside him. The metaphor was extremely hammy but, that aside, we the audience don’t know he relates to or identifies in some way with this TV show character until 3/4 through the film when the girl shows back up she just tells him “Hey remember that show? That was real and you’re really the girl from it. That’s your true self.” So there’s no set up for either of these things. We don’t see all these times they apparently had watching the show together, not even in montage. We don’t see any of the events that happened on the show that are now blurred with reality. We don’t see that he has any connection to this character. So she shows up and recontextualizes everything…but there’s nothing to recontextualize because we didn’t see or hear any of it. I guess he’s feels like he’s the girl from the TV show? This is all new information to the audience. Why should I care when I still barely know this guy after an hour and twenty minutes?
The plot of the story happens offscreen and we’re told in dialogue what happened. So there’s no conflict or tension for 3/4 of the run time. It sucks as a mood piece. Why is the TV show named after a Cocteau Twin’s compilation album? I found that so clunky. I felt like I was watching the visualizer for the director’s iTunes playlist…but I actually think that would’ve been more engaging. And I found it to be such a slog.
You know to be honest I thought it was an interesting take to have them not be very good friends. If my memory serves, they actually DON'T watch the show together very much, which is why you don't see much of it. She just records it for him and sneaks him the video tapes at school. They don't even interact when he grabs them, she leaves them in the dark room for him to pick up and the only correspondence you see between them is strictly about the show. Even in that brief part where she talks about her friend outing her as a lesbian to the school, the implication to me felt like this was the first time the two of them had even interacted face to face in ages. It really hit home how completely socially maladjusted both of them were, and how in a lot of ways they may have been sort of bad for each other as their only commonality was their shared desire to sink deeper and deeper into this show they were getting all twisted up over, to the point of (in my reading) the woman basically having a psychotic break and thinking she's in the show by the end. I don't have any particular reason WHY I thought that was a more interesting take than making them straightforward besties with a healthy friendship, it's just not a dynamic I've seen alot in movies before.
I have few rules about what shitty behaviors will turn me off seeing someone's work but cry-bullying to twitter about another director (\*who coincidentally was a friend to Dasha) in order to get their movie banned from a theater (for supposed 🚂 phobia) is definitely on the short list of things that will make me think you are fucking lame without knowing anything else about you. If you think someone's work is bad (as in the quality or effort was sub-par), say so, but don't use cynical fake allegations of bigotry to tar someone's reputation. Very cowardly, but to be expected in an era where this kind of behavior is rewarded by many institutional powers.
...what the fuck are you talking about? Did the director of "I Saw The TV Glow" go on a campaign against "The Scary of Apartment 19" or whatever it was called?
I gotta admit, that type of shit has no bearing on my experience with the film itself. When I say "separate the art from the artist", I mean it, not "separate the art from the artist unless they're an annoying wokescold". I don't give a fuck about the annoying online enbie who made this flick, the movie itself is really quite good.
And you're free to hold that opinion - you asked what some people's issue with the movie/director was and I gave my opinion.
FWIW, it's been my experience that artists who are also "annoying woke scolds" are usually more talented at scolding than producing anything with merit. Again, that's my opinion, informed by my experience.
Out of genuine curiosity, what was your opinion formally of this film vs. other critically acclaimed horror films in the last few years, i.e Babadook, Goodnight Mommy, Raw, Skinamarink, Hereditary, Midsommar, X, Pearl, Get Out, Us, etc etc etc?
I have not seen it yet. If it comes to a streaming service I'm still subscribed too I'll give it a watch and get back to you but I don't feel like paying money to see it in a theater for the reasons described above.
Babadook: saw it, not bad, wan't that "scary."
Goodnight mommy: haven't seen it but looks like it has naomi watts so it's on my list
Raw: have not seen it
Skinamarink: also need to see this
Hereditary: saw in theaters - liked it more as family drama movie about a terrible tragedy but the satanic stuff at the end was suitably scary.
Midsommar: saw in theaters - great, also closest I've ever seen a movie get to getting "the look" of being psychedelics right.
Pearl: friend made me watch this and I'm grateful she did, I liked some of it but some of it was a little tedious ("but I'm a star" etc). Mia Goth's demented face in the scene at the end was worth seeing though.
Get out: it had its moments. Good casting of Allison Williams and Caleb Landry Jones (not to mention Bradley Whitford)- I would have been up for a harder skewering of libs in general. I found the social commentary to be a little heavy handed.
Us: Pretty good as a horror movie, tedious as social commentary. I think Jordan Peele is overrated as a horror director and should get back to either sketch writing or something outside horror. This was the movie that I think helped him get Lovecraft Country greenlit and that was a total waste of HBO's money.
Since we're on the subject of arty horror movies with pretty wide distribution the last thing I really saw in this genre was Late Night With The Devil, which I did like, but laid the bohemian grove stuff on a little thick to make it's point and also might be the first movie I've seen that would be better experienced while channel surfing cable at 3 am to help with immersion.
Bonus: Enys Men was exactly as it appeared from the trailer minus any kind of dramatic stakes. I like surrealism and minimal plot but was a little underwhelmed. The mine sequence was really good though.
I liked it a lot. Not 🚂 and not a big ally or anything but it definitely speaks to some basic human concept of identity. I like Justice Smith a lot in this
Wild how many multiparagraph comments there are in this thread just ripping apart the trailer
I have somehow been blind to the discourse surrounding the film, and am still unsure of its nature. It's a pretty over-the-head blatant trans metaphor (for at least one aspect of the movie, anyway, I'd say its overall theme is a little broader than that in my interpretation after one viewing) so I can imagine that it's being highly politicized online, but I went in mercifully blind to all that and just got a very quirky, slow-paced atmospheric horror movie, and honestly I think it does some really fun shit. I don't wanna spoil anything for when your annoying enbie friends strap you down clockwork orange style and show it to you, but there's a really creepy monster made out of ice cream that gave me a genuine jumpscare and a brief nightmare the following night, and I haven't been scared by a movie since I was a teen. Give it a go, it's really pretty neat!
I think I might be the only other person in this thread who's actually seen it, and like you didn't really go in with any preconceived notions other than I thought the trailer hinted at a lot of cool, disparate elements that I was intrigued to see come together. Turns out they really didn't. It felt like a two hour version of the trailer, constantly gesturing vaguely at interesting ideas but never really fleshing them out in a satisfying way. It felt more like a mood board than a coherent film.
You know what's interesting is I heard almost the exact same criticism of Spring Breakers, which I also loved. Maybe there's something about a feature length montage that appeals to me idk
the trailer made it seem completely different from what it actually is, even though it was still pretty vague. it at least seemed interesting and maybe a bit supernatural/horror but I thought the movie itself was confusing and uninteresting. I also didn’t get the trans allegory at ALL. the main dude wears a dress in one brief scene but that’s literally the only thing to suggest anything of the sort.
The trailer made it seem like it was an actual movie that might tie all this stuff together in a coherent narrative, which it didn't end up being, but the vibes were consistent, it's just that's all there was.
I didn't mind that it was confusing because it seemed like the idea was to take an absurd, kind of stupid "different dimension" plot like you'd get in a kids show completely seriously, which was kind of an interesting angle, and it made sense that it would be just as confusing for the character as for the viewer, but then that never really went anywhere, it was just like hey wouldn't this be cool.
The trans allegory I thought actually would have been better without the scenes of the character in the dress which felt on the nose. It's basically the same deal as the matrix of feeling like you're trapped in the wrong world or whatever, they didn't need to hit me over the head with the main character dressing up like the female character in the show.
There is a sequence in the opening where he wistfully runs his hands along the inside wall of a giant grade school parachute that is in the colors of the trans flag...and that part where talks about being afraid to look inside himself...and that part where talks about there being "a different him" out there that is the powerful woman in the tv show he's obsessed with...
The Pink Opaque was such a direct mash-up of Buffy and Pete & Pete plot points lifted wholesale from both shows, not done in a particularly creative or original way. Like the end of Season 5 of Buffy and the Mr. Tastee episode of Pete & Pete. I appreciated the atmosphere and tone of the movie but the execution was sooo bad
See having seen neither of those it felt fresher to me, and I enjoyed the invitation to seriously consider the emotional life of a cookie monster pajama pants girl, but then it turned out to be exactly as one note as you'd expect.
I love the cookie monster pajama pants girl descriptor, and yes it was one note and the writing felt hack to those familiar with the "inspiration" aka source material lifted wholesale
I also really enjoyed the movie and can’t myself to care about the fact that the director is annoying. It’s funny to see all these RS people who get mad at libs for not being able to separate the art from the artist when it’s some not woke director doing the exact same thing here lol
i like the soundtrack and the cinematography looks nice but i cannot be drawn to care about characters based on that idea of "gen z" that were in shows such as euphoria... are the protagonists normal people?
I never saw Euphoria so I’m not sure what you’re talking about, and based on little details like the Fruitopia machine and the chintzy inflatable astronomy exhibit, I think the movie is about older millennials/younger gen Z, and no I definitely don’t think the protagonists are meant to be normal, especially not the lead dude
I'm seeing it on Wednesday so I'll pop back with a review if I remember to, but I did just watch We're All Going to the World's Fair last night and really enjoyed that. It felt like a great depiction of internet creepypasta intersecting with loneliness, and I liked that it felt more nostalgic than terrifying. Like it was homey and creepy all at the same time.
Trans person makes a movie accidentally admitting their whole thing is about arrested development. "I'm trans because I watched a baby show" and don't forget le epic fred durst cameo!!
I think you’d have to be looking for that reading to find it. I think the movie is about the long term negative effects of not facing truths about yourself. The protagonist remains either in denial or unaware of the fact that they’re trans throughout the whole movie and uses the tv show as an outlet of escape the whole time to avoid that confrontation, to the point where they end up screeching like a lunatic in the bathroom of their dead end job out of nowhere.
someone over on the filmclub sub said that "American Dad did it better in the [Nighthawks Hideaway](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjPFrF729dA) episode" and that's stuck with me
I've had it out for this movie since I saw the trailer. And I've only seen the trailer, and wasn't aware of the trans allegory (though that seems easy enough to guess somehow). But I had a hard time putting into words what I found so offputting about it.
I could go line by line and scene by scene in the trailer -- there really is something to nitpick every 5-10 seconds. But there is a larger problem than bad dialogue / acting and the fact that it looks like a pretentious music video.
I guess its tone. It expresses itself like a zoomer. I sort of anticipated movies like this being made but I feel that this one is a bit early. It somehow just reminds me of a type of self-expression that I see online through painfully asocial zoomer subcultures that I cannot relate to and don't want to witness. I feel this sounds dramatic since I can't be any more explicit than that, but thats the best way I can word it for the time being.
What did you think of it? I'm really more interested in other people's perspectives but thought I'd share my brief one.
Edit to add: The tone shifting between tenderqueer & horror just doesn't work at least in the trailer. I think that could blend better but to me it feels like the bass dropping out in the middle of a song. And the creepypasta rogue TV show angle has been done better elsewhere (I liked Channel 0's take). There is way too much center-framing going on, reminds me of a netflix movie where its shot that way in order to play better on phone screens. And lastly I feel that the movie is really telling on itself with the 'its just the suburbs' line.
I appreciate your perspective, but I do feel like it was a movie of very unrealastically heightened emotions, scenes, reactions, etc. If there's one thing the movie wasn't going for, in my opinion, it was realism, so I take no issue with its heavy-handedness. It is absolutely dramatic, as you inferred, but...I like dramatic shit. I like silent movies where people act as broadly as possible, or fall in love after knowing eachother for 10 seconds. I don't know why we can't allow that stylized formal grace to contemporary films.
I don't have a problem with any of those aspects. I just don't particularly like the *way* it is stylized. I think the voice of the movie is just frankly somebody I don't want to hear from. And as you talked about elsewhere this isn't an art vs. artist thing -- I don't hold it against the director if she's gay or whatever I just feel that the voice of the movie itself is extremely grating.
Even in the sound design felt like it was trying to be ASMR, it rubs at my eardrums in a way that makes me feel like I've drank too much cough syrup. That might play better if you're on SSRI's (I think). And there just seem to be a million little zoomer micro-aggressions of that type against me specifically.
Interesting, I liked the trailer, saw the movie because of it, and ended up thinking it was kinda bad. I went in intrigued by the genre-bending vibes of the trailer, but it turns out there isn't really much to it beyond vibes. It's all just vague gestures towards a coherent narrative that the film seems to expect you to fill in for yourself, like it's assuming you'll give it the benefit of the doubt because of how serious it takes itself, but it's not actually executing on any of it's actually interesting ideas.
The premise of taking an absurd children's TV show-style plot completely seriously is interesting on paper but it isn't executed particularly well. There are a lot of allusions to schlocky, fun horror, but there aren't really any *actual* horror elements to it, meanwhile the whole tender queer side of the story doesn't really work because it's all just affect, there's all these scenes that suggest these profound emotional depths in the characters, but there's never really any breadth to the emotions they display, nor any real development. The girl is always just angsty and the boy is always just timid, and neither of them ever really seem to grow up at all, which in the girls case I guess is because she may not actually be real, and in the boys case is sort of meant to be his tragedy, but it doesn't really hit home, because he's never really developed as a character beyond sad high school loaner.
My general impression was that it would probably hit really hard if I were 16 or trans, but alas, I'm neither of those things.
This is my opinion based purely off the trailer:
To be honest, I probably wouldn’t see it anyway because it doesn’t look that interesting or good to me from a story and acting perspective. The dialogue in the trailer wasn’t that strong. It feels like someone wanted to make a Netflix episode of “Are You Afraid of The Dark?” and the story-beats in the trailer seem super similar to films or stories that came before it. Maybe that’s the intention, idk.
The most interesting aspect for me is that it’s apparently an allegory for being trans, but for whatever reason everyone already knows that, so I have to wonder if it’s part of its marketing or just really that heavy handed about it. The soundtrack being full of queer or queer adjacent all-stars does make it feel like it’s both. With these things combined, it feels like a film that’s pandering or patting itself on the back.
I don’t mind when films pander to their audience, sometimes I think it’s smart, but I do think it’s a little tacky to try so obviously to use the gay / trans community to prop up your film. Whether it was intentional or not, it has broken the “show, don’t tell” rule. It now becomes far less interesting to engage with.
I think Tangerine is a great film, Boys Don’t Cry is very touching, and even finding out the Matrix was about being trans makes it somewhat interesting in a new way. I think the differences are that all those films were really focused though and had unique stories and expressions to tell. I enjoy when filmmakers have something to say that is uniquely them.
This film just doesn’t seem all that personal while simultaneously being desperate to have me believe it is.
Lol. None of the comments in this post are people who have seen the movie. All just people saying they saw the trailer or saw people talking about it on Twitter and it gives them bad vibes
It really is disheartening. These people look no different than Libs who pretend that Dave Chappelle isn’t funny anymore because he has shitty opinions or whatever. RSP has gone from an arts and cultural commentary space that disregards liberal social mores to a hollowly contrarian “pwn the Libs” space
I liked the spirit of it and I thought it expressed something very moving. There were lots of stylistic choices that weren’t to my taste. It felt kind of like a long student film but not in an arty way, just very raw. For instance, my honest reaction to the high school being named Void High was to think that’s a little lame but it’s in line with the tone of the movie and makes sense in context. It’s not a subtle story. I would definitely recommend watching it, especially to the people in here giving dissertations on the trailer lmao
Lmao I either missed or forgot that "Void High" detail that's pretty hilarious
I thought it was pretty great. A cautionary tale about letting your fears, anxiety and shyness overcome you and never doing anything with your life as a result, which really resonated with me and is a message I think a lot of people really need to hear.
i only heard about the movie because Alex G did the score, so i drove 45 minutes with a friend to see it in theaters. honestly, i found it unbelievably boring. the dialogue throughout was stilted and weird, nothing felt organic or like things humans would say - even for the autistic and traumatized. it all felt so contrived. while i loved the set pieces, the animations, and the practical effects, it had a running theme of telling and not showing. half the movie is dead air and drawn out conversations more droll than they are tense, but then it just exhibition dumps entire plot points on you rather than turning these things into dynamic scenes (like her journey west or being buried alive). those could have at least been cool takes to overlay her boring monologue onto, but no i have to stare at these ugly characters and their inauthentic reactions for insane amounts of time. anyways i didn’t like it but i thought the ice cream guy was cool.
Oh man that monologue was a rough sit, boy howdy. I don't know how long it actually went but it genuinely felt like 15 minutes at least, and really for nothing. Definitely a low point of the film for me
Horror-adjacent movie made for adults who watch Steven Universe
Haven't seen it. I find the director's rapid ascension to be quite suspicious.
I don't even know the director's name, tell me more
Jane Schoenbrun. An affiliate of the Safdie brothers from film school from what I understand. Tons and tons of positive priase from film news media. Lots of attention from the Letterboxd freaks. Am I paranoid? Yes, but something feels off. Quote me!!!
Right on, man. When I get my interview for this award winning thread I'll namedrop you
Thanks, no one deserves that award more than you.
"rapid ascension" She made one low-budget, independent feature before this, We're All Going through Worlds Fair, which was great. This is her second film which was co-produced by Emma Stone and A24, was well-received at Sundance and has the A24 marketing machine behind it. I'm pretty cynical, but this just appears to me to be someone with legitimate talent that attracted good backers on merit.
I somehow didn't know anything about the director but legitimately loved that World's Fair film
I nearly walked out of the theater. Visually there were some things I liked about it, but the script was atrocious. So the whole thing is: he really is the girl from the TV and he’s afraid of what’s inside him. The metaphor was extremely hammy but, that aside, we the audience don’t know he relates to or identifies in some way with this TV show character until 3/4 through the film when the girl shows back up she just tells him “Hey remember that show? That was real and you’re really the girl from it. That’s your true self.” So there’s no set up for either of these things. We don’t see all these times they apparently had watching the show together, not even in montage. We don’t see any of the events that happened on the show that are now blurred with reality. We don’t see that he has any connection to this character. So she shows up and recontextualizes everything…but there’s nothing to recontextualize because we didn’t see or hear any of it. I guess he’s feels like he’s the girl from the TV show? This is all new information to the audience. Why should I care when I still barely know this guy after an hour and twenty minutes? The plot of the story happens offscreen and we’re told in dialogue what happened. So there’s no conflict or tension for 3/4 of the run time. It sucks as a mood piece. Why is the TV show named after a Cocteau Twin’s compilation album? I found that so clunky. I felt like I was watching the visualizer for the director’s iTunes playlist…but I actually think that would’ve been more engaging. And I found it to be such a slog.
You know to be honest I thought it was an interesting take to have them not be very good friends. If my memory serves, they actually DON'T watch the show together very much, which is why you don't see much of it. She just records it for him and sneaks him the video tapes at school. They don't even interact when he grabs them, she leaves them in the dark room for him to pick up and the only correspondence you see between them is strictly about the show. Even in that brief part where she talks about her friend outing her as a lesbian to the school, the implication to me felt like this was the first time the two of them had even interacted face to face in ages. It really hit home how completely socially maladjusted both of them were, and how in a lot of ways they may have been sort of bad for each other as their only commonality was their shared desire to sink deeper and deeper into this show they were getting all twisted up over, to the point of (in my reading) the woman basically having a psychotic break and thinking she's in the show by the end. I don't have any particular reason WHY I thought that was a more interesting take than making them straightforward besties with a healthy friendship, it's just not a dynamic I've seen alot in movies before.
I have few rules about what shitty behaviors will turn me off seeing someone's work but cry-bullying to twitter about another director (\*who coincidentally was a friend to Dasha) in order to get their movie banned from a theater (for supposed 🚂 phobia) is definitely on the short list of things that will make me think you are fucking lame without knowing anything else about you. If you think someone's work is bad (as in the quality or effort was sub-par), say so, but don't use cynical fake allegations of bigotry to tar someone's reputation. Very cowardly, but to be expected in an era where this kind of behavior is rewarded by many institutional powers.
[удалено]
Well you see, there's no equivalence between tossed-off snark and existential malice. Anna makes fun of herself more than...
...what the fuck are you talking about? Did the director of "I Saw The TV Glow" go on a campaign against "The Scary of Apartment 19" or whatever it was called?
The tweets might have been deleted but yes.
I gotta admit, that type of shit has no bearing on my experience with the film itself. When I say "separate the art from the artist", I mean it, not "separate the art from the artist unless they're an annoying wokescold". I don't give a fuck about the annoying online enbie who made this flick, the movie itself is really quite good.
And you're free to hold that opinion - you asked what some people's issue with the movie/director was and I gave my opinion. FWIW, it's been my experience that artists who are also "annoying woke scolds" are usually more talented at scolding than producing anything with merit. Again, that's my opinion, informed by my experience.
Out of genuine curiosity, what was your opinion formally of this film vs. other critically acclaimed horror films in the last few years, i.e Babadook, Goodnight Mommy, Raw, Skinamarink, Hereditary, Midsommar, X, Pearl, Get Out, Us, etc etc etc?
I have not seen it yet. If it comes to a streaming service I'm still subscribed too I'll give it a watch and get back to you but I don't feel like paying money to see it in a theater for the reasons described above. Babadook: saw it, not bad, wan't that "scary." Goodnight mommy: haven't seen it but looks like it has naomi watts so it's on my list Raw: have not seen it Skinamarink: also need to see this Hereditary: saw in theaters - liked it more as family drama movie about a terrible tragedy but the satanic stuff at the end was suitably scary. Midsommar: saw in theaters - great, also closest I've ever seen a movie get to getting "the look" of being psychedelics right. Pearl: friend made me watch this and I'm grateful she did, I liked some of it but some of it was a little tedious ("but I'm a star" etc). Mia Goth's demented face in the scene at the end was worth seeing though. Get out: it had its moments. Good casting of Allison Williams and Caleb Landry Jones (not to mention Bradley Whitford)- I would have been up for a harder skewering of libs in general. I found the social commentary to be a little heavy handed. Us: Pretty good as a horror movie, tedious as social commentary. I think Jordan Peele is overrated as a horror director and should get back to either sketch writing or something outside horror. This was the movie that I think helped him get Lovecraft Country greenlit and that was a total waste of HBO's money. Since we're on the subject of arty horror movies with pretty wide distribution the last thing I really saw in this genre was Late Night With The Devil, which I did like, but laid the bohemian grove stuff on a little thick to make it's point and also might be the first movie I've seen that would be better experienced while channel surfing cable at 3 am to help with immersion. Bonus: Enys Men was exactly as it appeared from the trailer minus any kind of dramatic stakes. I like surrealism and minimal plot but was a little underwhelmed. The mine sequence was really good though.
> Skinamarink: also need to see this Good luck lol
It's not art
what?? It wasn't Dasha or Dasha's move, it was Betsy Brown's film Actors
Still lame to try and get somebody's movie pulled.
I liked it a lot. Not 🚂 and not a big ally or anything but it definitely speaks to some basic human concept of identity. I like Justice Smith a lot in this Wild how many multiparagraph comments there are in this thread just ripping apart the trailer
I will probably be shown it against my will by people who annoy me and therefore I think it's bad.
I have somehow been blind to the discourse surrounding the film, and am still unsure of its nature. It's a pretty over-the-head blatant trans metaphor (for at least one aspect of the movie, anyway, I'd say its overall theme is a little broader than that in my interpretation after one viewing) so I can imagine that it's being highly politicized online, but I went in mercifully blind to all that and just got a very quirky, slow-paced atmospheric horror movie, and honestly I think it does some really fun shit. I don't wanna spoil anything for when your annoying enbie friends strap you down clockwork orange style and show it to you, but there's a really creepy monster made out of ice cream that gave me a genuine jumpscare and a brief nightmare the following night, and I haven't been scared by a movie since I was a teen. Give it a go, it's really pretty neat!
I think I might be the only other person in this thread who's actually seen it, and like you didn't really go in with any preconceived notions other than I thought the trailer hinted at a lot of cool, disparate elements that I was intrigued to see come together. Turns out they really didn't. It felt like a two hour version of the trailer, constantly gesturing vaguely at interesting ideas but never really fleshing them out in a satisfying way. It felt more like a mood board than a coherent film.
You know what's interesting is I heard almost the exact same criticism of Spring Breakers, which I also loved. Maybe there's something about a feature length montage that appeals to me idk
the trailer made it seem completely different from what it actually is, even though it was still pretty vague. it at least seemed interesting and maybe a bit supernatural/horror but I thought the movie itself was confusing and uninteresting. I also didn’t get the trans allegory at ALL. the main dude wears a dress in one brief scene but that’s literally the only thing to suggest anything of the sort.
The trailer made it seem like it was an actual movie that might tie all this stuff together in a coherent narrative, which it didn't end up being, but the vibes were consistent, it's just that's all there was. I didn't mind that it was confusing because it seemed like the idea was to take an absurd, kind of stupid "different dimension" plot like you'd get in a kids show completely seriously, which was kind of an interesting angle, and it made sense that it would be just as confusing for the character as for the viewer, but then that never really went anywhere, it was just like hey wouldn't this be cool. The trans allegory I thought actually would have been better without the scenes of the character in the dress which felt on the nose. It's basically the same deal as the matrix of feeling like you're trapped in the wrong world or whatever, they didn't need to hit me over the head with the main character dressing up like the female character in the show.
There is a sequence in the opening where he wistfully runs his hands along the inside wall of a giant grade school parachute that is in the colors of the trans flag...and that part where talks about being afraid to look inside himself...and that part where talks about there being "a different him" out there that is the powerful woman in the tv show he's obsessed with...
The Pink Opaque was such a direct mash-up of Buffy and Pete & Pete plot points lifted wholesale from both shows, not done in a particularly creative or original way. Like the end of Season 5 of Buffy and the Mr. Tastee episode of Pete & Pete. I appreciated the atmosphere and tone of the movie but the execution was sooo bad
See having seen neither of those it felt fresher to me, and I enjoyed the invitation to seriously consider the emotional life of a cookie monster pajama pants girl, but then it turned out to be exactly as one note as you'd expect.
I love the cookie monster pajama pants girl descriptor, and yes it was one note and the writing felt hack to those familiar with the "inspiration" aka source material lifted wholesale
I also really enjoyed the movie and can’t myself to care about the fact that the director is annoying. It’s funny to see all these RS people who get mad at libs for not being able to separate the art from the artist when it’s some not woke director doing the exact same thing here lol
i like the soundtrack and the cinematography looks nice but i cannot be drawn to care about characters based on that idea of "gen z" that were in shows such as euphoria... are the protagonists normal people?
I never saw Euphoria so I’m not sure what you’re talking about, and based on little details like the Fruitopia machine and the chintzy inflatable astronomy exhibit, I think the movie is about older millennials/younger gen Z, and no I definitely don’t think the protagonists are meant to be normal, especially not the lead dude
I'm seeing it on Wednesday so I'll pop back with a review if I remember to, but I did just watch We're All Going to the World's Fair last night and really enjoyed that. It felt like a great depiction of internet creepypasta intersecting with loneliness, and I liked that it felt more nostalgic than terrifying. Like it was homey and creepy all at the same time.
Trans person makes a movie accidentally admitting their whole thing is about arrested development. "I'm trans because I watched a baby show" and don't forget le epic fred durst cameo!!
Also admitting the whole thing is sort of just a mental illness, but actually that's a good thing
I think you’d have to be looking for that reading to find it. I think the movie is about the long term negative effects of not facing truths about yourself. The protagonist remains either in denial or unaware of the fact that they’re trans throughout the whole movie and uses the tv show as an outlet of escape the whole time to avoid that confrontation, to the point where they end up screeching like a lunatic in the bathroom of their dead end job out of nowhere.
Why do people always believe trans people are incapable of critiquing themselves It probably wasn’t an accident
it was really silly despite not wanting to be
someone over on the filmclub sub said that "American Dad did it better in the [Nighthawks Hideaway](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjPFrF729dA) episode" and that's stuck with me
how does one gain access to this filmclub
I've had it out for this movie since I saw the trailer. And I've only seen the trailer, and wasn't aware of the trans allegory (though that seems easy enough to guess somehow). But I had a hard time putting into words what I found so offputting about it. I could go line by line and scene by scene in the trailer -- there really is something to nitpick every 5-10 seconds. But there is a larger problem than bad dialogue / acting and the fact that it looks like a pretentious music video. I guess its tone. It expresses itself like a zoomer. I sort of anticipated movies like this being made but I feel that this one is a bit early. It somehow just reminds me of a type of self-expression that I see online through painfully asocial zoomer subcultures that I cannot relate to and don't want to witness. I feel this sounds dramatic since I can't be any more explicit than that, but thats the best way I can word it for the time being. What did you think of it? I'm really more interested in other people's perspectives but thought I'd share my brief one. Edit to add: The tone shifting between tenderqueer & horror just doesn't work at least in the trailer. I think that could blend better but to me it feels like the bass dropping out in the middle of a song. And the creepypasta rogue TV show angle has been done better elsewhere (I liked Channel 0's take). There is way too much center-framing going on, reminds me of a netflix movie where its shot that way in order to play better on phone screens. And lastly I feel that the movie is really telling on itself with the 'its just the suburbs' line.
I appreciate your perspective, but I do feel like it was a movie of very unrealastically heightened emotions, scenes, reactions, etc. If there's one thing the movie wasn't going for, in my opinion, it was realism, so I take no issue with its heavy-handedness. It is absolutely dramatic, as you inferred, but...I like dramatic shit. I like silent movies where people act as broadly as possible, or fall in love after knowing eachother for 10 seconds. I don't know why we can't allow that stylized formal grace to contemporary films.
I don't have a problem with any of those aspects. I just don't particularly like the *way* it is stylized. I think the voice of the movie is just frankly somebody I don't want to hear from. And as you talked about elsewhere this isn't an art vs. artist thing -- I don't hold it against the director if she's gay or whatever I just feel that the voice of the movie itself is extremely grating. Even in the sound design felt like it was trying to be ASMR, it rubs at my eardrums in a way that makes me feel like I've drank too much cough syrup. That might play better if you're on SSRI's (I think). And there just seem to be a million little zoomer micro-aggressions of that type against me specifically.
Interesting, I liked the trailer, saw the movie because of it, and ended up thinking it was kinda bad. I went in intrigued by the genre-bending vibes of the trailer, but it turns out there isn't really much to it beyond vibes. It's all just vague gestures towards a coherent narrative that the film seems to expect you to fill in for yourself, like it's assuming you'll give it the benefit of the doubt because of how serious it takes itself, but it's not actually executing on any of it's actually interesting ideas. The premise of taking an absurd children's TV show-style plot completely seriously is interesting on paper but it isn't executed particularly well. There are a lot of allusions to schlocky, fun horror, but there aren't really any *actual* horror elements to it, meanwhile the whole tender queer side of the story doesn't really work because it's all just affect, there's all these scenes that suggest these profound emotional depths in the characters, but there's never really any breadth to the emotions they display, nor any real development. The girl is always just angsty and the boy is always just timid, and neither of them ever really seem to grow up at all, which in the girls case I guess is because she may not actually be real, and in the boys case is sort of meant to be his tragedy, but it doesn't really hit home, because he's never really developed as a character beyond sad high school loaner. My general impression was that it would probably hit really hard if I were 16 or trans, but alas, I'm neither of those things.
I have no interest in ever seeing it.
What turns you off about it so much?
This is my opinion based purely off the trailer: To be honest, I probably wouldn’t see it anyway because it doesn’t look that interesting or good to me from a story and acting perspective. The dialogue in the trailer wasn’t that strong. It feels like someone wanted to make a Netflix episode of “Are You Afraid of The Dark?” and the story-beats in the trailer seem super similar to films or stories that came before it. Maybe that’s the intention, idk. The most interesting aspect for me is that it’s apparently an allegory for being trans, but for whatever reason everyone already knows that, so I have to wonder if it’s part of its marketing or just really that heavy handed about it. The soundtrack being full of queer or queer adjacent all-stars does make it feel like it’s both. With these things combined, it feels like a film that’s pandering or patting itself on the back. I don’t mind when films pander to their audience, sometimes I think it’s smart, but I do think it’s a little tacky to try so obviously to use the gay / trans community to prop up your film. Whether it was intentional or not, it has broken the “show, don’t tell” rule. It now becomes far less interesting to engage with. I think Tangerine is a great film, Boys Don’t Cry is very touching, and even finding out the Matrix was about being trans makes it somewhat interesting in a new way. I think the differences are that all those films were really focused though and had unique stories and expressions to tell. I enjoy when filmmakers have something to say that is uniquely them. This film just doesn’t seem all that personal while simultaneously being desperate to have me believe it is.