TheUlyssesian

This made me happy too -

This is probably their best scene. And they already showed it?

For sure. Like I said above - our reactions are just a proxy for what we thought of the remake. If you don't like something, it can feel absolutely worthless. And if you like something, it can feel worth everything. I just happen to be in the former camp on this one - for a director mind you, I immensely love and admire. I will just also state that the theory of this forum is predicated on film music at least in a pretextual sense, so naturally those are the sort of films that get discussed here. I am sure we all watch a much wider swath of cinema than is discussed here, at least I do - and those most definitely veer towards very serious art. Spielberg is capable of that too and has made art several times in his career - often even melding entertainment and great art. I value originality immensely - just as a personal preference. Or doing something not done before or telling a story not told before or making something not made before. Simply on that criterion The Post is vastly superior to me than WSS - which to me is an inferior remake of a superior adaptation in almost every imaginable way.

I respectfully disagree with this view entirely. I think cinema has the capability of creating art. It is an artistic medium - just as sculpture is, just as literature is, just as painting is, just as theater is. To the extent that a medium has the capacity to create art, to represent the truth of humanity, to explore the mysteries of our minds and how we think, it is immensely valuable. I do not subscribe to the view cinema is just entertainment. That might be the case with Hollywood blockbusters but there is a lot of worthwhile art that is created in this medium also. Might not meet the criteria of entertainment for 99.9999% of people but to the extent art is a noble pursuit, then no cinema is not useless. Just my humble opinion.

I don't care for Meryl Streep all that much. What The Post excels at is that it is a tremendous work of film direction. As I have noted before, the Post is actually much more respected and admired in Europe for precisely its auteur qualities. The opening is a little bit hokey. But the entire final section - the last one hour or so - which almost play like takes place in a single evening as the journalists decide to publish the papers, it absolutely gripping, superb and as entertaining as any action movie. It shows Spielberg at his nimble-best, managing to arrange a large number of actors in several frames and giving each of them something to do while moving the scene along. If you just like the directorial art of blocking, staging, mis en scene, composition and cutting, then The Post is a marvel.

A live show and a movie are not the same at all. Live shows can be revived ad nauseum no problem. It is not something bottled. Film is. With that out of the way - your reasoning is basically tied to what someone thinks of the remake itself. I happen to not have a good opinion of it, so I think it was gigantic waste of time, waste of effort and I would much rather have seen one of my favorite directors do something useful or meaningful. Sure I am no one to dictate his schedule but I can freely express my opinion. Now those who happen to like the remake may think it was a good use of time and resources. So ultimately it might boil down to what people think of WSS 2021 in deciding where they fall on the issue of its usefulness. -- Now to demonstrate that the liking a movie shouldn't follow that you think it is useful .. for the discerning viewer... I will advance the case of Matrix 4. I personally liked the movie, enjoyed it and I think it is good. I can still have the opinion that it was absolutely and totally pointless. So even people who think the remake is good can have the opinion that this was a pointless movie and a deserved failure.

The first two were original musical. LLL cost only 30 mil. Les Mis was the first time the musical was being adapted to the big screen. WSS 2021 is a remake of a successful box office musical that already was a box office smash, is widely available, considered a great cinema classic and won 10 oscars. It kinda-sorta like remaking Sound of Music. Why? - Would be a question a lot of audiences would have.

This movie was definitely copying another movie's success in that regard - going by your criterion. There had been recent musical hits that made money and the original movie was a blockbuster and the WSS on broadway has also made bank. Hence this movie version. And again, this movie is exploiting a known IP for commercial reasons. And it failed at the commercial part.

Demand is a representative word. And again whipping out Godfather, Star Wars etc. are extreme examples. It implies WSS 2021 is somehow comparable to them it is not. I think it is to do with IP. Those films were creating IP, WSS2021 was using it. Usages of IP are invariably commercial in nature. As has already been stated above, if Speilberg wanted to put in the hard word and create a musical from scratch, he would have done so. Instead he chose a successful IP, to remake an already existing musical. So when you are leveraging IP, producing content with commercial outlooks, working with blockbuster budgets, you definitely factor in demand.

That other films failed isn't a justification for your film failing. It is never a good result. And I mean - Blade Runner is one of the greatest films ever made - completely in a different universe. WSS2021 at the end of the day is the needless remake of a cinema classic. So not really analogous. As to the release time - we have already stated repeatedly in this thread that the release date had nothing to do with the failure. We know for a fact that young people - given a product they like - are going out IN DROVES. Spiderman is performing as if there wasn't a pandemic in sight. Look at Sing 2, Encanto and Ghostbusters etc. So the pandemic cannot be an excuse. The stated goal of this film - its mission statement and the reason it even received a blockbuster production and marketing budget is because it was precisely made for young people - for the Spiderman crowd. It has young people in the lead roles - some of them youtube stars, it is about the lives of young people about young love and has those liberal activist pieties appealing to young people. It was heavily marketed to young people - with a not a penny spared in promotion. It STILL failed. The conclusion is - there wasn't demand for this product at all. None. Zilch. Nada. There are think pieces being written about who Speilberg even made this movie for? The answer is really damning. The answer is himself. It very much is a personal vanity project. No one asked for this movie. No one. For 99.99% of the people who want to see a version of WSS, the original is good enough. There was literally no reason to make this film, not at this budget level, and certainly not before investigating if the young people they made it for had even the slightest interest in this.

Ah yes one. When I made my post, this is the one I wanted to mention rather than killing but I remembered it as Monumenta and try and google what I might, I couldn't find the name, so I went with Killing. Killing and Robopocalypse were very very close. Robopocalypse came down to the script. If Speilberg wanted to make it, he did have everything lined up. He decided at the last moment that he did not like the script and so pulled the plug. Killing really did come down to casting. And you will be surprised, this is sometimes an issue for multi-lingual roles. Landa in Inglorious Bastards was supposedly meant for Dicaprio but I wonder if that would have worked out. The part requires fluency in 4 languages with a majority of the scenes taking place not in English. Tarantino had the same problem, he thought he would shelf it if he couldn't cast Landa. He feared he had written an unplayable part. He then found Waltz. Also another thing I noticed - bless his heart, Spielberg is EXTREMELY economical. https://screenrant.com/steven-spielbergs-biggest-budget-movies/ Take a look at his budgets. Not one in the routine 200-250 range that the average superhero movie costs. So this man is very old school, likes to come in on schedule on budget, and as a professional always deliver a profit for his financiers. One of the reasons he pulled Robo is because he thought it might be too expensive and turn a loss. WSS is the bigges failure of his career in the sense this is the movie that will lose the most money out of any movie he has ever made. Surely that's got to hurt him a bit. You really have to wonder, such a careful smart director really miscalculated on this one.

This is no different. Both movies will lose a lot of money. Both were totally unnecessary. I like one of them. But I am thrilled by the failure of both.

I think that's part of the creative process which I find more interesting. I think most artists realize in finishing up their work that there can always be more economy, more leaning down. I am currently working on a screenplay and I made this very elaborate structure for myself and I wrote a quick first draft to get it out. As I am doing the work of finishing it, I am losing so many scenes and lines - just realizing that I did not need them after all. I think telling a story is a always a matter of communicating information - succinctly - to your audience. You realize there is often immense synergy in how the viewer consumes art. The viewer has an immense ability to fill in the blanks, as you realize that, you feel confident and comfortable taking more and more out so that you deliver a pacy experience and the viewer is never bored throughout and always intrigued and interested and entertained. I definitely have this experience with writing, I've managed to cut 20 pages off my script from the first draft to the final draft. I think film editing is much the same process. A film can read quite a bit differently when it is on the page. But when it is in front of your eyes, it can be quite a different beast and you can definitely pare it down. That is what I think Denis has done. Sorry for the long winded answer here but I just wanted to make my point is that if we are interested in Denis The Artist's vision then we have to give in to his vision that he wants to show us. Anything else if of academic interest only - academic interest in the process of artistic creation - which is of course a worthwhile indulgence too.

I wonder if this kind of content has any meaning when the director has final cut. Dune is exactly 100% Denis Villeneuve's movie. He had full absolute total control, made exactly the movie he wanted and how he wanted with no constraints whatsoever. He presented his vision to the world and it was released in exactly his version of his vision. So why is this extraneous material interesting? It's not like we are not seeing the movie the auteur wanted us to see. There isn't any sort of what-might-have-been with Dune is there?

I LOVE Spielberg but there is an unmistakable whiff of an ego project about WSS for him. He has been shouting from the rooftops since decades he wants to do a musical. He did not want to do the hard work of creating a musical from the ground up. Say what you will about La La Land but they did that. No Spielberg wanted that HIS musical would be nothing less than the best American musical of all time - when it has a perfectly good classic adaptation. Honest to god but for Spielberg, this probably wouldn't get made and now he has gone and set fire to 100 mil dollars just to scratch an itch. As a fan of Spielberg, I am not sure this was a good use of either his time or his clout. I would much rather he gotten some other of his dream projects funded and made like The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara etc.

Then why spend 100 million dollars on an unsure thing in a genre that does not always perform well with no stars and a movie no one is asking a remake of? It is almost like tempting fate to be a failure.

Then why is it a box office calamity losing hundreds of millions of dollars in a massive write down?

It would have been a gigantic failure regardless. The problem for this movie is not timing - but its existence. Who was this made for? No one. Nobody asked for it. You can't make a product with zero demand and then wonder why it did not sell.

I unfortunately have watched the Nolan trilogy if you are referring to that. And not a note of - let's call it "music" to be charitable - inspired me to so much as listen to any track on youtube even. Just sounded like noise to me. And fart trombones blasting over everything.

Just came across this. Gonna post it here. It made me happy.

Parallel Mothers Luck Number Slevin

Film Scores of the year 1. Zack Snyder's Justice League - Junkie XL 2. Annette - The Sparks Brothers 3. Jungle Cruise - James Newton Howard 4. Raya and the last Dragon - James Newton Howard 5. The French Dispatch - Alexandre Desplat 6. France - Christophe 7. Parallel Mothers - Alberto Iglesias 8. Eternals - Ramin Djwadi Best Tracks of the year 1. At the speed of force - Zack Snyder's Justice League 2. Baby Aria - Annette 3. Eternals Theme - Eternals 4. Photoshoot - Parallel Mothers 5. Obituary - The French Dispatch Best Composer 1. James Newton Howard Best Film About Music 1. The Disciple 2. Annette Biggest Disappointments 1. West Side Story 2. Nightmare Alley 3. The Tragedy of Macbeth 4. Annette Best Films 1. Drive My Car 2. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy 3. Memoria 4. Benedetta 5. Titane 6. The Worst Person in The World 7. France 8. Bad Luck Banging 9. Parallel Mothers 10. The Disciple

Review from Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/jan/01/harry-potter-20th-anniversary-return-to-hogwarts-review-perilously-close-to-emetic Calls it emetic - which means it made them vomit.

On a slightly related note - how toxic is Hammer? They are reshooting his scenes in another film out next year by Taika Waititi. Will Arnett stepping in his shoes. The Deadline article linked says reshoots for Death on the Nile were not possible given the ensemble nature of the production.

It's not super inspired but surely more than 2 notes are better than 2 notes. 2 notes is just lazy.