Letterboxd

[jal90]

acervofilmico is a person or persons who represents an archive in Mexico. They worked tirelessly to catalog Mexican films on LB from a bunch of different angles (decade, genre, etc) and didn't/doesn't interact much with anybody. I v much doubt they've seen all those movies, the fact of logging them must mean something else.

I think they may be marking what is available, or maybe it is a large group of people and they vote collectively for the films each of them have watched.

[Monsieur Arkadin]

I've been thinking about Sean Baker's apparently history making quadruple win for Anora at the Oscars this year. Remembering the most recent Sight And Sound poll, it was incredibly clear how much Janus films, and Criterion in specific, were controlling the narrative of "great films" for contemporary filmmakers and critics.

I kind of wonder if Sean Baker being the most prominent (public) letterboxd user has had some influence on the academy which now skews younger than it has in previous years. And as a result are filmmakers going to start mimicking his LB presence in the hopes of a tangible career benefit?

[rischka]

this is a good question - i was just reading this great piece on anora - https://internetprincess.substack.com/p ... ican-dream

https://letterboxd.com/itscharlibb/

also i've been following charlixcx i stopped following sean baker as he seems to love everything. anora is my least favorite of his films

[flip]

https://letterboxd.com/itscharlibb/

also i've been following charlixcx

so one of charlixcx's favourite films is by rivette, and she just added a bresson film to her watchlist? i can respect that...

[Monsieur Arkadin]

That is a great piece, highlights a lot of the things that make the film too intriguing to dismiss. However, I also wasn't particularly in love with the end result.

I don't follow charlie, but I stumble across her page occasionally and her tastes are charmingly idiosyncratic. She seems to have a thing for Juiliet Berto.

[wba]

The piece writes what the film is about. I also felt and saw that while watching it, cause it's evidently obvious what the film is about (it literally hits you with a hammer with its messages, and doesn't stop hammering till the credits roll). The ideas expressed in it don't make it a good film though. Artworks aren't mere containers for ideas. In art, it isn't so important WHAT you talk about, rather than HOW you talk about it. How you express yourself artistically. And, like many Best Picture Oscar winners of the past 30 years, Anora simply sucks as a work of art. It's a bad film. It's as simple as that. You can also think about all the ideas, the article deals with, without having to watch a stupid film. I know I did when I was young. That's why for me there weren't any fresh ideas in the film, nothing unpredictable happening. To me it felt like watching one of those bad horror movies, where awful people make awful decisions. It's not a bad thing if a film has no fresh ideas and everything that's happening is predictable. I don't watch films to be surprised by ideas. I watch them because cinema is an art and I hope to experince a great piece of art. And Anora doesn't deliver in that regard. Not the directing, not the editing, not the camerawork not the acting. It's basically a waste of time, if you're a movie lover.

[Monsieur Arkadin]

I don't fully agree. I think the piece highlights the ambivalence of genre/tone that the film manages quite well. I like the observation that during the attack scene in the living room which is played kind of zany, but kind of straight (at least for a while), people are reacting in two drastically different ways. People in my crowd also largely took it as riotous, whereas I felt it was a quite disturbing sequence (one that taints the rest of the film's treatment of "sweet" Igor. Hard to see him as a nice boy when we just recently spent 15 minutes straight wondering what he was going to do to this girl). It seemed to be demanding comparisons to Uncut Gems so I was kind of waiting for the moment of brutal violence to stop her in her tracks. A tension that never fully gets resolved. The fact that the movie devolves into a much lower stakes situation, and a more comedic (structurally speaking) approach without ever removing the threat of violence that is looming, is formally interesting to me. Also kind of unsatisfying in the specific manner with which it was handled.

[wba]

That scene characterizes Igor. He's evil, but no sadist. Not much more I'd say. What people expect or don't expect from a scene is up to the individual, and not something the film "does". To me there was nothing funny about it. The whole film was like watching a horror movie. I personally don't laugh when watching horror movies but feel the horror of it. But that's my personal reaction. Not something the film achieves. Maybe one of my problems with the film was that I never found any moment to be funny. If it wasn't merely horrifying, the completely normal and everyday stupidity of all the characters was also pathetic. Like in real life. I don't make fun of stupid people in real life as well.

[rischka]

i also struggled with the 'screwball comedy' aspect

i couldnt laugh

funny wba lists pretty woman as one of his 1990 favorites - it's the film i thought of alongside uncut gems

[Monsieur Arkadin]

I don't understand the idea that "feeling the horror" of a horror film is not something the film achieves. Genre is a social contract between the film and the audience. If we watch a horror film, and we both feel horror, then the contract has been fulfilled. If we watch a Rom-Com and feel horror, that could be an individual, personal reaction that has nothing to do with what the film achieves. But if enough of the audience have the same reaction, then at a certain point we have to recognize that the social contract of the genre was broken. Either intentionally or not. But that dissonance of the broken contract is certainly something achieved by the qualities of the film, and it is measurable in the numbers of audience who experience similar reactions.

I don't think Anora is a Rom-Com, or intended to be a rom-com. I don't really think it was advertised as such either. But the fact that it balances itself on the cusp of two disparate emotional responses, such that audiences are not really coming away with a disparate array of experiences but rather 1 of 2 contradictory ones, is absolutely something the film achieves from my perspective. And that's interesting to me, if not artistically successful.

I also thought of Pretty Woman, which somehow reflects poorly on Anora for me. Because Anora is sort of presented as a more "realistic" Pretty Woman, one that confronts the icky transactional, class, and patriarchal elements of Pretty Woman head-on... except, I fell like Pretty Woman equally (if not more) confronts those questions without telling you that it's confronting them. It remains completely faithful to the social contract of its Genre, while also being quite uncomfortable intellectually. That dissonance is also interesting to me.

I'll return to Pretty Woman periodically throughout my life. I doubt I'll need to do so with Anora.

[wba]

Maybe it's because I don't watch a film expecting anything? At least not in terms of genre, or what the film should or might do. I expect to have a good time, but that's that.
So a film cannot fulfill or contradict my expectations, or any of that. I also don't think if a horror film makes me feel horror (like Anora, which is definitely a horror film in my book, if I would have to classify it in terms of genre), or a comedy makes me laugh, the film has achieved something that is actually an achievement worth noting. I want artistic expression in a movie, not an intellectual or emotional exercise. I simply felt like Anora was a dull, paint-by-numbers effort, that failed artistically on all accounts. The last recent film I remember watching which was in my opinion equally devoid of any cinematic qualities was DUNE: PART ONE.

As for PRETTY WOMAN, I hated it as a young cinephile, cause it was way too subtle (everything went completely over my head, and I merely 'noticed' the things which get regularly mentioned in order to criticize the movie). I only started to love it when I was much older. I completely agree with your assessment: PRETTY WOMAN discusses most of the ideas ANORA does (besides the Russia-Ukraine allegory), but also many others ANORA isn't interested in. PRETTY WOMAN actually is a film for grown-ups and a mature audience, while ANORA is a juvenile movie that pretends to be interested in human beings when it only uses the characters to hammer home its "ideas".

[wba]

i also struggled with the 'screwball comedy' aspect

i couldnt laugh

funny wba lists pretty woman as one of his 1990 favorites - it's the film i thought of alongside uncut gems

Now that you mention it, I see a lot of thematic similarity to both, and some aesthetic similarities in regards to UNCUT GEMS.
But I was too horrifyed by the world and the characters the movie presents, and mostly horrifyed by the way it chooses to express that world in such a lifeless way, to make any comparisons with actually decent movies.

Yeah, I also couldn't laugh at anything but also wasn't aware anybody could find anything the movie does to be funny.

[flip]

this won't be an important feature of movies for some people, but one thing film can achieve is a certain intensification of a particular emotion, just as a chef might be trying to create the most intense beetroot flavour in a puree or whatever. film can provide an experience more intense than the quotidian banality of reality. and a lot of 'art films' that seem to be popular, though not so much here at scfz, often seem to be intensifying a feeling of revulsion, or paranoia. some films are more effective at this than others, and one of my objections to anora is that it isn't as effective, on its own terms (as i perceived them), at doing what it was trying to do -- to me it's like the low calorie version of a safdie brothers film.

and if richard gere was a character in a godard film, he would have been named richard genre i bet.

[BattleNug]

I thought of Anora as one of those unhappy psychological mashups, where the humour works in a few places but so does the horror and alienation, all in roughly equal, low amounts, and so instead of transcendence we end with dull discomfort. Per flip, it doesn't really taste like anything. I recall finding it a bit instructional (almost condescending) in the rugpull at the end -- to the imagined viewer, who's begun to presumably identify with the strange energy of this developing sexual tension or romance, they are suddenly manipulated into the realization that this is not all fun and games. To more discerning viewers, this was perhaps all too apparent to begin with. To add another layer, Baker's usual fixation on the details of his social settings seems lost by the wayside here, as the depiction of sex workers has faced some criticism by sex workers: https://angelfoodmag.com/romance-labor

[rischka]

letterboxd banner ads are out of control. everytime my adblocker updates they find a way around it. aggh

[Monsieur Arkadin]

Lol. I have pro so I forget that it's basically an unusable website until I accidentally log out.

[Lencho of the Apes]

Oh, shit! Nathaxnne has deleted her account. All that marvelous writhing lost!

[rischka]

oh no i hope they're ok.