The Film Thread: Page 295 - The Arsenal discussion forum and community: One More in the Tolly

The Film Thread

QuincyAbeyie

Don't know exactly what you mean by cool, as I don't analyze movies as some of you do. I either enjoy them or don't. I do think Django, Kingsmen, Hateful 8, Ex Machina and Nightcrawler were cool movies though.

Qwiss

Kingsmen has a one really cool scene but is it a cool movie? The end is really silly, the quips are cheesy as shit. Thats not a dig at the movie either, its all intentional and IMO it works but its not cool. Nightcrawler and Ex Machina are good movies but whats cool about them? Is there anything cool going on in Ex Machina. I mean its largely about Domnhail Gleeson, one of the least cool looking dudes in Hollywood.

Burnwinter

Qs gets it. So many of these films just aren't cool.

As another example, The Matrix was a cool film.

QuincyAbeyie

If a cool movie is a movie with cool looking guys who says cool things, then Ex Machina isn't cool. Django certainly is that. I guess I just use a different definition of cool, a word which is used pretty loosely.

Also, Sam Jackson isn't cool in The Hateful Eight because he's grotesque and old, but the church scene in Kingsmen is cool?

Burnwinter

Although Jamie Foxx gets his moments, Django isn't particularly cool in the way I mean, because Django and Schultz aren't self-serious heroes.

A film like Anton Corbijn's The American is trying to be cool.

Burnwinter

You're not getting it Quince. The only cool scene in Kingsmen is the one from the trailer, in which Colin Firth trashes the gang in the pub.

QuincyAbeyie

I certainly am not. 🙂

Burnwinter

Well, that's more or less the only scene where you go "Fuck yeah—I want to be that guy". An emotion you experience from the perspective of the young lad.

The church scene's just an amusing bit of action comedy excess.

Mirth

Don't think Kingsmen were going for cool. Great movie though.

Klaus

Burnwinter wrote:
For an example of a character and film that have coolness, consider Chow Yun-Fat in The Killer.

Chow is a stellar example. I think he's naturally got the kind of charisma that made filmmakers like John Woo write films for him, rather than just cast him to capitalise on his name and reputation. Part of the reason Chow never made it big in America is because they were trying to do the latter instead.

The reason no one is cool in a Tarantino film is because it's all fabricated and cut to fit his post-pulp audience. He's just like everyone else in Hollywood who's trying to make films that are easy to peddle to an imaginary middle-of-the-road audience in that sense. Only when he made Kill Bill did he venture outside that thinking and made something that was genuine and true to his own convictions.

Ironically those two are arguably also the most Tarantinoesque films he's ever made, but the style and the approach makes sense here. No one else would have pulled off the Sonny Chiba meets Sergio Leone in a clash between east and west theme. It's a bold exploration of the defining trait in modern pop culture where making art from other media artifacts turns those into art themselves. Uma Thurman (who's the reason those films exist; Tarantino wrote them for her much in the same way Woo wrote The Killer and Hard Boiled for Chow) and David Carradine were fucking cool in those films, and to date, they play the only cool characters Tarantino has ever created with the notable exception of Jackson in Pulp Fiction.

Burnwinter

Precisely my thoughts Klaus, it's like you read my mind.

Hong Kong really gets cool in general, and that's what Hollywood is always trying to cannibalise even if it doesn't always realise it.

It's not just about the martial arts, or the suits and guns. It's often about screenwriters, film-makers and actors holding their nerve about taking the fiction seriously—they'd rather push into melodrama and blood opera than let the earnestness drop, but they don't have to sacrifice humour doing it either.

It's about getting to the end of Infernal Affairs and there being a Mexican standoff on a high rise where all these cool characters care to the maximum, they've all been built up for two hours to be there and to be desperate to triumph.

QuincyAbeyie

I think I'll lay off what's cool and settle for just distinguishing between good and bad. Easier that way. 🙂 Considering I don't know what cool is, I certainly don't have a problem with too few movies being just that.

jones

Burnwinter wrote:
It's about getting to the end of Infernal Affairs and there being a Mexican standoff on a high rise where all these cool characters care to the maximum, they've all been built up for two hours to be there and to be desperate to triumph.

Speaking about the end of Infernal Affairs, I liked it much better than the ending of The Departed. The latter is still a great film for Hollywood standards and I loved Mark Wahlberg's asshole character.

Burnwinter

Quincy Abeyie wrote:
I think I'll lay off what's cool and settle for just distinguishing between good and bad. Easier that way. 🙂 Considering I don't know what cool is, I certainly don't have a problem with too few movies being just that.

Burnwinter

Departed's pretty good, Infernal Affairs is better, yeah. I think Nicholson's Irish gangster's a bit of a misfire in The Departed in some ways.

Klaus

Burnwinter wrote:
Hong Kong really gets cool in general, and that's what Hollywood is always trying to cannibalise even if it doesn't always realise it.

It's not just about the martial arts, or the suits and guns. It's often about screenwriters, film-makers and actors holding their nerve about taking the fiction seriously—they'd rather push into melodrama and blood opera than let the earnestness drop, but they don't have to sacrifice humour doing it either.

Totally. Jackie Chan is another example I feel. Some of his early Hong Kong stuff was outrageously cool. Police Story, Project A, Armour of God... he pioneered an entire form of cinema. And then in the states he made watered down stuff like Rush Hour, The Medallion and The Tuxedo instead; films that on the surface carried a bunch of the same signifiers but neither had the heart or the integrity.

I think east-Asian cinema on the whole has an easier time blending ideas and styles without sacrificing depth. My favourite Miike film is this thing called The Bird People in China. It's part comedy, part adventure, part arthouse. It has small elements of social criticism in its makeup too. It was made back in 1998, a few years after a project called Three Gorges Dam was started by the Chinese government. Today it's known as the largest hydroelectric project ever conceived, levelling 13 cities and hundreds of villages in rural China when it was turned on in 2009. Millions of people had to relocate and most archeological evidence of human habitation was destroyed, right in an area that was claimed to be the key to Chinese history.

The film is set in these territories, but it's not 'about' the pending destruction in any sense really, other than giving us genuine glimpses of breathtaking nature and a small, hidden mountain civilisation that is full of beauty and tradition precisely because it has been left untouched by the modern world. Herzog made a somewhat similar film in Fitzcarraldo (minus the comedy), but I keep thinking that if it had been made in America it would have been either an extremely politicised tale about environmentalism or a mismatched couple comedy. The art and the emotion is constantly sacrificed at the expense of a unified message. As if that's what having style is about.

QuincyAbeyie

Burnwinter wrote:
Quincy Abeyie wrote:
I think I'll lay off what's cool and settle for just distinguishing between good and bad. Easier that way. 🙂 Considering I don't know what cool is, I certainly don't have a problem with too few movies being just that.

Burnwinter

🙂 No offence. I went looking for a popcorn gif and that awesome thing was the first one I found.

QuincyAbeyie

Ah. None taken then. 🙂

Qwiss

Gotta love Hader.

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