Sign in to follow this  
Erkki

I had a random thought about movies

Recommended Posts

I think I just found a continuity error in Pierrot le Fou. After someone posted a photo of a model that reminded me of Anna Karina and after someone else commented that it makes him think of the 60s, I wanted to see if I actually would find a similar frame from the movie.

 

frame1.thumb.jpg.0b40773716eca7e8e08d2c9a4b2199b8.jpgframe2.thumb.jpg.e2c9e25d0e3cafdd60adbe8a15639ef6.jpg

 

Her dress changes from striped to non-striped. And I don't think it's just captured like that on the camera, in another scene she is about the same size and you can see it's striped.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Actually now I'm thinking that it's the same dress, just appears like that to the camera or after encoding when the pixels-per-dress decreases.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

"Yaphet Kotto Christmas Sweater" is the same cadence as "Tinker Tailor Solider Spy" and arguably even more satisfying to speak aloud.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

The dress illusion strike again! What is really weird is that Pierre's face does not appear blue in those pictures.

 

 

Also, every time someone mentions Anna Karina or Godard, I'm reminded of this scene.

 

 

I don't mind.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I decided to become a Letterboxd patron and now I can see some more stats about my movie watching. For example, my most watched directors. There are some surprises here for me...

 

Jim Jarmusch is a long-time favourite, but I hadn't realized I have seen more of his movies than anyone elses, I didn't even realize he had made this many. I think this counts shorts like Int. Trailer Night. Wow, Mario Bava has shot to the top 5 and I only found out about him in August! According to the current prognosis, he will even pass Kieslowski soon and maybe Bergman temporarily - but since Bergman made A LOT of films, I expect him to take the lead at some point. Also I think this list is telling me that I should catch up with Hitchcock, especially since I go around wearing his face on a T-shirt most of the time. And it probably wouldn't hurt getting more familiar with Kurosawa as well from the big names, at least should get him into this top. Also, Jean Painlevé doesn't really count IMHO, because I only saw a lot of his short animal movies, which were on Mubi all the time.

 

9a8c2a77fe.jpg

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I like to do the same thing but with Criticker:

 

96EAo11.png

 

The far right # is the # of films I've seen. The number just to the left of it is the average tier the movies are in, out of 10 tiers (higher is better). I guess I've seen a lot of Spielberg! I'll eventually make it to where you are with Jarmusch, for sure - he's high on the list of people to watch through obsessively. I guess I really like Kubrick and really dislike Vaughn. The average tier ranking can be kind of skewed if just a few movies suck, which is why Cameron Crowe is so lowe.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I manually checked a bunch of directors on Letterboxd. Entirely possible I'm missing something, but I think these are my most watched directors:

Woody Allen - 42

Steven Spielberg - 34

Robert Altman - 23

Spike Lee - 23

Buster Keaton - 21

John Carpenter - 19

Coen Brothers - 18

Martin Scorsese - 17

Wes Craven - 17

Brian De Palma - 17

David Lynch - 15

Alfred Hitchcock - 14

Roger Corman - 14

Ridley Scott - 13

Mario Bava - 13

Billy Wilder - 12

David Cronenberg - 12

Richard Linklater - 12

Michael Curtiz - 11

Paul Thomas Anderson - 10

Roman Polanski - 10

Christopher Nolan - 10

Joe Dante - 10

Francis Ford Coppola - 10

William Wyler - 10

George Romero - 10

David Fincher - 10

Wes Anderson - 10

Robert Zemeckis - 10

John Huston - 9

Kenneth Anger - 9
Russ Meyer - 9

Stanley Kubrick - 8

Kathryn Bigelow - 8
Anthony Mann - 8
Robert Wise - 8

Larry Cohen - 8

David Mamet - 8
Vincente Minelli - 8

Quentin Tarantino - 8
John Ford - 8

 

Hard to imagine anyone topping Woody Allen, unless I start digging through and fully marking every single Loony Tunes cartoon I've ever seen, in which case it wouldn't surprise me if I've seen more Chuck Jones films than anything else.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Holy crap, that's a lot to catch up with, if I'd want to. I did not know about most of your top 10+ directors that they even made this many movies.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I used to do a podcast where each episode we would cover a different director, so a lot of these I watched for that. It was a good primer on film history.

 

Also, this is Letterboxd so when it comes to people like David Lynch and Buster Keaton, it's including a lot of shorts.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I got into an argument on a local feminist forum about separating the author from their work after some article about Polanski was posted. The article paints quite a dark picture of the entire Hollywood coming in defense of a child rapist https://www.google.ee/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/film/2018/jan/30/hollywood-reverence-child-rapist-roman-polanski-convicted-40-years-on-run

 

What I said was that for me even with all this it’s quite difficult to say that this should mean boycotting his work as I’m somewhat interested in film history and some of his are top quality films. I realized that it might be easy for most people to boycott movies of Polanski as they don’t have much interest in those particular movies anyway, but try boycotting the movies that Weinstein produced and you’ll have a real difficult dilemma if you want to equate the beneficiaries of a work with the work for moral purposes.

 

What do people here think? Is there any good philosophical writing on this besides “Death of the Author” (I haven’t yet read that, though).

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

As I understand it, the 'death of the author' critical theory is about separating authorial intent from the audience reading - i.e. it doesn't matter if that's not what the author intended, even if they've said so explicitly, it's how I read it and that's just as valid. Perhaps it also covers separating the author as a person from their work, though.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Personally, I refuse to participate in spending my money in a way that supports men (it's almost always men) who are monsters. I refuse to see Polanski's or Woody Allen's movies, I refuse to listen to R. Kelly's music. I refuse to see movies based off of Orson Scott Card's books knowing that he's a bigot who uses his money to fund anti-LGBT campaigns.


This line has to be drawn differently for everyone. For example once a person is dead, consuming the art they make no longer contributes to their wealth and ability to abuse more people. I'm much more likely to consume the art of someone problematic if they're no longer alive, but I can't in good conscious go see a Woody Allen movie knowing that it's going to make him more money and get him more movie deals so that he can continue to be rich and famous and do things like prey upon his adoptive children.

 

My only request to people who continue to consume the art of monsters ask themselves the question of 'is my enjoyment of this thing worth the potential ramifications of this person's continued success to me?' and the answer of that question may very well be 'yes' but I just want people to at least ask the question to themselves.

 

There's so much art in the world that we can never hope to get to all of it, so I think why not allow a creator's real world actions impact my decision making? They are just helping me narrow down my options to things I don't feel guilty about liking.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
8 minutes ago, jennegatron said:

Personally, I refuse to participate in spending my money in a way that supports men (it's almost always men) who are monsters. I refuse to see Polanski's or Woody Allen's movies, I refuse to listen to R. Kelly's music. I refuse to see movies based off of Orson Scott Card's books knowing that he's a bigot who uses his money to fund anti-LGBT campaigns.

Or, to put it more accurately, you refuse to knowingly participate in spending your money in a way that supports men whom you know are monsters. I think anyone who spends money on anything other than tiny self-published indie games and self-published albums is going to inevitably be supporting men who are monsters, either because some of the famous men haven't been outed yet or because many of the non-famous men are monsters. So for instance if you watch, like, any studio film, some of your money is going to however many monster men work in that studio, which I think we can safely guarantee is way more than zero, because as Erkki has noted, Hollywood is full of monsters.

 

My own view is that I tend to not give a shit about my own particular expenditure in terms of that money going into a monster's pocket, because I don't care whether or not monsters have money. I do care about my particular expenditure sending some sort of message, like "Woody Allen is a bankable name" or something like that, so I usually avoid seeing movies/buying books/music/etc. that involve high profile abusers. I want those works to fail, not because I care about who gets money but because I think the message we as a society should be sending is "keep making your stuff, but we're not going to support you."

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

A point well taken tycho. There's bound to be someone involved in the movie somewhere that is an abuser and we just don't know it. I can only act on the information I have, like you said.

 

4 minutes ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

My own view is that I tend to not give a shit about my own particular expenditure in terms of that money going into a monster's pocket, because I don't care whether or not monsters have money. I do care about my particular expenditure sending some sort of message, like "Woody Allen is a bankable name" or something like that, so I usually avoid seeing movies/buying books/music/etc. that involve high profile abusers. I want those works to fail, not because I care about who gets money but because I think the message we as a society should be sending is "keep making your stuff, but we're not going to support you."

 

This is kind of what I was trying to get at with this:

17 minutes ago, jennegatron said:

 I can't in good conscious go see a Woody Allen movie knowing that it's going to make him more money and get him more movie deals so that he can continue to be rich and famous and do things like prey upon his adoptive children.

 

Knowing that spending money on the projects of people I find detestable helps prop up their careers and allows them to continue working and having the visibility to find and groom victims to abuse. I want them to be denied the privilege of making profitable art and no longer have the power of fame.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I can sympathize with both points. Denying money and not caring about it - in the end we want them punished according to the law, not necessarily to control their finances.

 

What about Weinstein in particular, though? Are people prepared to boycott Tarantino movies, LOTR and many others from which Weinstein continues to make money AFAIK.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I, personally, am willing to forego seeing Weinstein distributed and produced movies. It seems that even though he was forced to resign he maintains stakeholder status  is unlikely to be removed. I like movies, and have Movie Pass which means I am starting to see a lot more movies in theater, but like I said before, there's enough good stuff in the world to see that I don't need these movies in my life.

 

Like I said before it's 100% a personal line to draw for yourself. If you continue to see movies produced by his company though, you may face some questioning or pushback from other people, but that's the risk of living in the world no matter what choices you make /shrug

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
2 hours ago, jennegatron said:

I, personally, am willing to forego seeing Weinstein distributed and produced movies. It seems that even though he was forced to resign he maintains stakeholder status  is unlikely to be removed. I like movies, and have Movie Pass which means I am starting to see a lot more movies in theater, but like I said before, there's enough good stuff in the world to see that I don't need these movies in my life.

 

Like I said before it's 100% a personal line to draw for yourself. If you continue to see movies produced by his company though, you may face some questioning or pushback from other people, but that's the risk of living in the world no matter what choices you make /shrug

I'm in the same position except that I often can't remember to check whether it's a Weinstein movie before I see it. I'm not sure if I've seen any Weinstein movies since the info came out, for instance. Also I don't really care about the production company or the guy making money, I just care about whether he keeps working there, so if after his apparently bullshit rehab, if he's back in the office, then I'll probably start making much more of an effort.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

It gets even trickier when something like the Elisha Dushku thing happens  - she recently claimed that she was sexually assaulted during the production of True Lies by the stunt coordinator. How do you vote against someone in that role with your wallet?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

You can definitely refuse to see any movie he (Joel Kramer) works on and/or any director who would choose to continue working with him. Of course being vocal about it on social media will always make your intentions clearer (and encourage others to do the same). His last job, Blade Runner 2049, was done well before Dushku came out about the assault. The next director to choose to work with him will forever be suspect in my eyes.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Some would probably also raise the question of whether to base decisions in reaction to what one person says. When it's just about hearing people's stories, it's easier to assume everyone who says they were assaulted or abused is telling the truth. But courts can't take just that, and a huge number of people (especially men?) have been conditioned to think that the presumption of innocence should apply to the media and everyday life as well, not just the courts. I was also pretty convinced of that even a few years ago, I think. Many could argue that just when Dushku says she was assaulted, doesn't mean we should take a decision to boycott anything. I've personally started to be inclined to think that let's believe the victim until proven to be lying. Unless this kind of voluntary boycott process would become widely abused for sabotage, there'd be no real concern that outdoes the concern of people in the industry still getting assaulted and abused.

 

I'm starting to think that a systematic boycott would be good, actually. But we're mainly talking about Hollywood, which is very visible. What about people like me who watch a lot of films from different countries, including some movies which are so unknown that you can't even find much info about them online. I guess taking them in good faith is the best course, and I certainly can't fathom doing background checks for the main crew roles of every movie I watch. Following the money thoroughly might require investigative journalism.

 

And what do you guys think about watching those movies on platforms where there's no money going directly* to the makers or no money going to them at all. Is that just cheating yourself? I don't know, in the US and UK you may have more scruples about piracy, but I still probably pirate at least 1/3 of the movies I see (especially older ones), although I haven't done statistics.

 

* and I don't actually know, how money goes to rights holders when a movie is watched on Netflix, FilmStruck or other streaming service.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
10 hours ago, Patrick R said:

The next director to choose to work with him will forever be suspect in my eyes.

Although I think sometimes the producers/studio get the final say on this? I think it can be sort of tough to know what the right line is in terms of being vindictive about someone working with someone else. Is all the cast and crew on any Wooden Allen film verboten? If so, that wipes out a huge swathe of Hollywood movies, given how many people work on movies, how many movies they work on, etc.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
Sign in to follow this