therewillbeblus wrote: ↑Tue Aug 04, 2020 3:19 pm
So your argument is rooted in how you’d personally want the thread to go, and you chose to reach that goal by reducing the worth of his last film to two words? That’s only going to bring forth more defenses, especially when you’re aware of a “gravitational pull.” I’m a fan of his work, but only find this film to be a very specific case where I’m quick to defend because I believe it is far denser than others want to give it credit for. My counter argument is that the emotional value of it has been unfairly dismissed (or misread, hence what started today’s conversation) by people who have a chip on their shoulder against him for the reasons you state, or based on his other often unapologetically shallow works. Dismissing an artist or their work based on the trend of discussions others make in defense of their films is also an odd argument.
Not everything is "an argument," twbb, and me categorizing my post as one was
entirely facetious. And
again, the first line in that post was a
joke, "macho bull" being a play on Reichardt's dismissive use of "macho" in the interview and a pun on the fact that her latest film is about
a cow, which the gif was supposed to make even more heavy-handedly apparent, and even
that was a joke about the discussion
here, not a reduction "of the worth of his last film to two words."
So yes... I was making a joke, and commenting, not arguing, about how I'd wish the thread would go. And on
that point, carrying on from the posts in the interim...
Anyways, I do think this thread is sadly lacking in conversation about Reichardt herself, which makes the ongoing debate accumulate into an unfortunately sizable percentage of the thread. In an effort to change that, I’ll say that Night Moves is one of my favorites of her works, mostly because it takes the thriller model and whittles it down to a real-time drama. The film’s rhythm mimics the slightly elevated heartbeat of someone breaking the law (outside of an exaggerated high-intensity robbery scenario), and that deconstruction of an eco-thriller into the pace of the thrills of actual ecological beings is fascinating. I think she does something similar but reversed in Wendy and Lucy, taking a more deceptively ‘lowkey drama’ story and building it as a realistic ascending anxiety attack to become a thriller.
I really do need to rewatch
NM given how all my appreciation for all of her other films has grown on subsequent viewings, but it was the only one I felt averse to after finishing, whereas I was at least vaguely positive yet underwhelmed in the other instances. It seems folks are starting to come around to it, though, as I've started to see more people come out in defense of it in the past year so. I meant to rewatch it in the run up to First Cow's release, since the weekend that everything shut down I was supposed to see a mini-fest of all of her features save that one, including
First Cow, with her at an in-person Q&A twice. (Jon Raymond was still able to show up for the post-
Old Joy Q&A the weekend before, and he was a surprisingly good interviewee.)
I'll try to get around to watching it and see if I can muster the time and energy to write something about it.
Also, Reichardt taught film at my sister’s college and she never took one of her classes, which still pains me to this day ten years later, selfishly because I want to know how she teaches film in a live setting.
Her
reviews on ratemyprofessor.com came up on Twitter recently, and some of them belong in the "rediculous reviews" thread:
Terrible sense of humor. Overarchingly misandric. Stupidly affected. Does not care about you personally, just her own strict, unflinching ethos. Did not instill me with a love for film. Her dog's nice though.
And yeah, TKH, if you like the rest of her movies, it's definitely worth seeing at
least once, at the very least because it's a weird blend of a Reichardt movie and a mainstream heist thriller, as twbb points out.
