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Quintus

By Quintus,
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Muad'Dib
Muad'Dib

Disney's response to Joker?

HunterTech
HunterTech

Bespin, I find it best not to make comments like those, given how very fresh this all is, as well as still not knowing the full details of the incident itself. Regardless of whatever opinions you migh

May the Force be with You
May the Force be with You
Dixon Hill

Dixon Hill 4,229

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Now I have no interest in this film one way or another, but yeesh. How many times can Weinstein crap all over someone's film before his amorphously bloated self is stopped?

http://collider.com/grace-of-monaco-release-date-pushed-weinstein/#disqus_thread

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JoeinAR

JoeinAR 1,759

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with a little andro you kill not only ant man but all the ant's in the nest.

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AC1

AC1 3,565

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The French want meaning and content.

And why shouldn't they?

There's nothing wrong with that but it's a illiberal viewpoint. Art doesn't need meaning or content. Luckily, the other half of the public in Cannes understood that and gave Only God Forgives a standing ovation.

Cheers!

Alex

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Sharkissimo

Sharkissimo 1,971

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The French want meaning and content.

And why shouldn't they?

There's nothing wrong with that but it's a illiberal viewpoint. Art doesn't need meaning or content.

Good art should, IMO. I don't believe in the 'art for the sake art' maxim. Just because I'm watching a Nicolas Winding Refn film, that doesn't mean I should drop my values, critical judgement or basic humanity at the door.

To judge a film based on its style alone, is to sell one's soul.

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JoeinAR

JoeinAR 1,759

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not all film is art. it's all craft but art, no.

OMgoodness the new Fantastic Four sounds like a f king mess.

last time the lovely but completely wrong for the role Jessica Alba as Sue Storm paired with her "brother" Chris Evans was a complete success.

Now they want to pair Saiorse Ronan or Kate Mara as Sue with "brother from another motha" Michael Jordan.
Josh Gad as the Thing. well he is rotund at least. He's also the oldest of this clearly under 30 average cast.

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AC1

AC1 3,565

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The French want meaning and content.

And why shouldn't they?

There's nothing wrong with that but it's a illiberal viewpoint. Art doesn't need meaning or content.

Good art should, IMO. I don't believe in the 'art for the sake art' maxim. Just because I'm watching a Nicolas Winding Refn film, that doesn't mean I should drop my values, critical judgement or basic humanity at the door.

To judge a film based on its style alone, is to sell one's soul.

IMO, style is the only thing that belongs the artist, the only true reflection of ourselves, not meaning and content. Expression is identity. With other words, style is the soul. The rest is nothing more than subject.

Alex

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mrbellamy

mrbellamy 5,231

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Yes, but style is only ever worth a damn if it's serving, reflecting, expressing content. As Sidney Lumet so eloquently put it:

Critics talk about style as something apart from the movie because they need the style to be obvious. The reason they need it to be obvious is that they don't really see. If the movie looks like a Ford or Coca-Cola commercial, they think that's style. And it is. It's trying to sell you something you don't need and is stylistically geared to that goal. As soon as a "long lens" appears, that's "style." From the huzzahs that greeted Lelouch's A Man and a Woman, one would've thought that another Jean Renoir had arrived. A perfectly pleasant bit of romantic fluff was proclaimed "art," because it was so easy to identify as something other than realism. It's not so hard to see the style in Murder on the Orient Express. But almost no critic spotted the stylization in Prince of the City. It's one of the most stylized movies I've ever made. Kurosawa spotted it, though. In one of the most thrilling moments of my professional life, he talked to me about the "beauty" of the camera work as well as of the picture. But he meant beauty in the sense of its organic connection to the material. And this is the connection that, for me, separates true stylists from decorators. The decorators are easy to recognize. That's why critics love them so. There! I've had my tantrum.

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AC1

AC1 3,565

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I definitely understand what Sidney Lumet is saying but he's a director who mainly lets the content dictate the style, mostly resulting in a form of naturalism that is quite invisible or unnoticeable. I've always looked upon Lumet as THE advocate and specialist of humanistic and realistic moviemaking. Lumet is a fly on the wall. That's how he lets the content, story and characters prevail and why nobody actually is noticing 'style' in Prince Of The City. To him, style might get in the way of content. However, Lumet is from a very different school than visual stylists like Kubrick, Scott, PTA or De Palma who use style in a way that is definitely meant to be seen. Unlike Lumet's, their laguage is meant to enhance, to distort or to color the subject (often referred to as 'enhanced realism'). I believe that for Refn it's all about emotions and impressions you can get from watching film. To him, it's not really the apple on the painting or its realism that matter. It's what you feel when you look at it. And while I'm not truly a big fan (I like them though) of Drive, Valhalla Rising or Only God Forgives, I certainly can appreciate that there are directors out there who are making films like that.


Alex

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Sharkissimo

Sharkissimo 1,971

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The French want meaning and content.

And why shouldn't they?

There's nothing wrong with that but it's a illiberal viewpoint. Art doesn't need meaning or content.

Good art should, IMO. I don't believe in the 'art for the sake art' maxim. Just because I'm watching a Nicolas Winding Refn film, that doesn't mean I should drop my values, critical judgement or basic humanity at the door.

To judge a film based on its style alone, is to sell one's soul.

IMO, style is the only thing that belongs the artist, the only true reflection of ourselves, not meaning and content.

The core of the artist is his conviction. His/her style is a manifestation of that conviction.

The problem is when an artist has no conviction, like Refn. That's when art rings hollow. It's just an elaborate mindgame/mindfuck.

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AC1

AC1 3,565

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You're just making wild assumptions (not facts) based on your personal understanding. I mean, claiming he has no conviction ... I would argue he has a stronger conviction than most other directors.


I would argue that Kubrick, Scott, PTA, and De Palma's best work completely fits what Lumet is saying, though.

What Mr. Shark is saying about Refn, many others are saying about Kubrick, Scott, PTA, ... Half the room is booing while the other half stands up to applaud.

Plus Refn is a big fan of Breaking Bad so that's another point in my book. ;)

Alex

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Sharkissimo

Sharkissimo 1,971

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You're just making wild assumptions (not facts) based on your personal understanding. I mean, claiming he has no conviction ... I would argue he has a stronger conviction than most other directors.

All I know is from what he puts on the screen. Armond White said it best.

The humorless appeal to adolescent taste ultimately infects Refn’s concept of heroism. Though Julian sometimes has psychic visions of dismemberment, he displays a catatonic chic. His confrontation with Chang is spoken with schoolkid childishness: “Wanna fight?” is an attempt at conveying innocent depravity. Such stupidity must strike Refn and his fans as cool. Given the film’s pervy, incestuous teases, Gosling is like a little boy wearing Mommy’s dress, necklace and high-heels. And director Refn is his playmate. Each of Gosling’s Refn roles is a drag act in which he strikes poses too grown up for his callow brooding and too silly for Refn‘s overwrought style. A truly cool actor might wink at Refn’s conceits but Gosling plays at intensity and mysterious depth that seems borrowed–and it is a drag. (Scott Thomas beats star and director at their game: her decadent, racist matriarch suggests the damnedest impersonation of Ellen Barkin in Johnny Handsome.)

This nonsense is so inorganic to any sense of globetrotter restlessness or anything explicitly or metaphorically to do with British or American colonialism that it just feels derivative. That Kubrickian scene in Drive of dead-eyed strippers watching an assault gets extended here in a more elaborate whorehouse sequence where catatonic hookers bear mute witness to instances of police corruption. Refn’s tableau of organdy-gowned call-girls listening to pop while watching violence in a bouquet-bedecked whorehouse is the ultimate David Lynch parody.

Gosling and Refn have art ambitions–a strange sense of fun. But how can film culture progress with fantasies like this? There’s no shock or outrage left. Refn relies upon a level of menace (unerotic, non-provocative) that precludes caring about or responding to violence, vulnerability, mortality. This is cinema for unsophisticated viewers who don’t already know Bunuel’s eye-slashing, Altman’s Coke bottle assault or Shakespeare/Julie Taymor’s Titus. Children of Kubrick, Friedkin, Lynch and Tarantino, they remain infantile about movies.

http://www.nyfcc.com/2013/07/dud-of-the-week-only-god-forgives-reviewed-by-armond-white-for-cityarts/

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AC1

AC1 3,565

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Well, I love Julie Taymor too and it would truly surprise me that you like her too, Mr. Shark. Anyway, does this still means that I am unsophisticated (according to this Armond White character I am) because I still like Refn's films (even though I've seen Lynch, Kubrick and Taymor)? At least, Refn is making movies completely how he wants to make them. And he seems to love silent films that are very visual. To me that's a step in a good direction.

To the fans of Refn and Breaking Bad, here's his comment about the series:

"Well, Walter white gotta go down! I wish he didn't but I'm sure that's what he's going to end with. Breaking Bad is like watching Shakespeare but not on stage. I think it's absolutely wonderfully written, directed, acted and photographed. It pushed the limit of how we view television: it went completely out of the episodic [structure] and every season peeled the layers away from Walter White's inevitable destiny. That I find very inspiring. It's what made me see television as a medium now to work with."




Cheers!

Alex - a bigger fan of BB than of Refn

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AC1

AC1 3,565

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Rest me to say that I'm somewhat uncomfortable with the notion that art stems forth out of 'conviction'. It sounds like this refers to politics. IMO, art stems forth out of 'emotional reaction' or a 'search for something' (usually 'beauty'). It can exist without any form of conviction. Am I wrong? Can the good folks of JWfan enlighten me on that?

Alex

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Sharkissimo

Sharkissimo 1,971

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Rest me to say that I'm somewhat uncomfortable with the notion that art stems forth out of 'conviction'. It sounds like this refers to politics.

It refers to politics, social activism, faith and in the case of Spielberg, humanism. The search for aesthetic beauty isn't enough.

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mrbellamy

mrbellamy 5,231

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Rest me to say that I'm somewhat uncomfortable with the notion that art stems forth out of 'conviction'. It sounds like this refers to politics. IMO, art stems forth out of 'emotional reaction' or a 'search for something' (usually 'beauty'). It can exist without any form of conviction. Am I wrong? Can the good folks of JWfan enlighten me on that?

Alex

I think art is communal and an attempt at mutual understanding, and that any display of artistic method or vague search for beauty or self-expression without "conviction" or a desire to communicate to others is ultimately meaningless. Why would any artist put themselves through it otherwise? To prove their individual value for its own sake? To prove they have self will?

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