Unless you're spoiled beforehand, EVERY movie is two movies. Even before we hear bedtime stories, we're set to wonder "what happens next?" to a tale we haven't heard before, and that takes up the bulk of attention on our first watch - any thought spent on the movie's themes, composition, or even our own impressions is balanced against this constant flow of new information. Just by virtue of knowing the plot, that "and then what happens" component's gone, and so our second encounter with a movie can't help but be different.
The Coen Bros are unique and idiosyncratic enough for me to often get drastically different impressions of their films on subsequent viewing. I was particularly angered by the ending of "No Country", how Brolin's character exits the movie with a brief pan to a body on the ground and a movie with such brilliant imagery ending on Tommy Lee Jones TELLING us a dream. Both were valuable artistic decisions, but both left me flat on my first watch going, "Really? That's what you're doing?"
Thanks for this. I still haven't seen it, esp. after all the sturm und drang at HE. I am more old man than movie buff and I just do don't want to use up three hours. Your thoughtful piece helps me to not bother. White guys: custodians and protectors of the inverted system of values in the material world, under whose crimes we suffer.
Yeah. I mean, it's fine. I don't think you'd be mad you saw it. And Gladstone really is a major discovery. But it's definitely second-tier Scorsese for me.
I went to Killers of the Flower Moon because I wanted to see if it could overcome my bias against it. It mostly didn't, but I have a lot stacked up against the film—too many white male voices in the making of it, DiCaprio, who has been given an overly glorious career, and the words I was reading in advance about the lack of a strong Osage experience. If I have too much against something, I'll often try it, just to see what I am protesting, and why. But (spoiler alert) here's the thing—the last scene and Scorcese's last sentence flipped the entire watching experience. It was like a deck of cards spread on the table reversed. His 1930s FBI-approved voice of the broadcaster brought such a self-awareness that it made me view the story from another lens, one with humility, one knowing how the white interpretation (and absences) can characterize everything. I gasped.
I'm editing my next book on the last public execution in America, a legal lynching in my hometown in Kentucky. The whole thing was confused until I moved the camera toward the white community that I grew up in, and not inside the habitual view, toward what the whites always observe about themselves and others. Thank you for the conscious work on gaze in storytelling, Kristi. I'm excited to hear what you have to say about this, in Jenkins and other directors. That awareness of what's happening in the gaze is necessary in Killers, the white men were stupid and boring, their bodies wore drab and dirt, they did things because they could get away with it, not any other principle. It felt like Scorcese was making us look at whiteness from inside its dumb horror.
Unless you're spoiled beforehand, EVERY movie is two movies. Even before we hear bedtime stories, we're set to wonder "what happens next?" to a tale we haven't heard before, and that takes up the bulk of attention on our first watch - any thought spent on the movie's themes, composition, or even our own impressions is balanced against this constant flow of new information. Just by virtue of knowing the plot, that "and then what happens" component's gone, and so our second encounter with a movie can't help but be different.
The Coen Bros are unique and idiosyncratic enough for me to often get drastically different impressions of their films on subsequent viewing. I was particularly angered by the ending of "No Country", how Brolin's character exits the movie with a brief pan to a body on the ground and a movie with such brilliant imagery ending on Tommy Lee Jones TELLING us a dream. Both were valuable artistic decisions, but both left me flat on my first watch going, "Really? That's what you're doing?"
Thanks for this. I still haven't seen it, esp. after all the sturm und drang at HE. I am more old man than movie buff and I just do don't want to use up three hours. Your thoughtful piece helps me to not bother. White guys: custodians and protectors of the inverted system of values in the material world, under whose crimes we suffer.
Yeah. I mean, it's fine. I don't think you'd be mad you saw it. And Gladstone really is a major discovery. But it's definitely second-tier Scorsese for me.
I went to Killers of the Flower Moon because I wanted to see if it could overcome my bias against it. It mostly didn't, but I have a lot stacked up against the film—too many white male voices in the making of it, DiCaprio, who has been given an overly glorious career, and the words I was reading in advance about the lack of a strong Osage experience. If I have too much against something, I'll often try it, just to see what I am protesting, and why. But (spoiler alert) here's the thing—the last scene and Scorcese's last sentence flipped the entire watching experience. It was like a deck of cards spread on the table reversed. His 1930s FBI-approved voice of the broadcaster brought such a self-awareness that it made me view the story from another lens, one with humility, one knowing how the white interpretation (and absences) can characterize everything. I gasped.
I'm editing my next book on the last public execution in America, a legal lynching in my hometown in Kentucky. The whole thing was confused until I moved the camera toward the white community that I grew up in, and not inside the habitual view, toward what the whites always observe about themselves and others. Thank you for the conscious work on gaze in storytelling, Kristi. I'm excited to hear what you have to say about this, in Jenkins and other directors. That awareness of what's happening in the gaze is necessary in Killers, the white men were stupid and boring, their bodies wore drab and dirt, they did things because they could get away with it, not any other principle. It felt like Scorcese was making us look at whiteness from inside its dumb horror.