The young Lauren Bacall somehow looks very contemporary. No idea why...
The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?
71–80 of 160 posts
Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having an "explanation" that it's all pointless magic is not an explanation. I suspect that the writers originally had a coherent story arc, but the show was so successful they had to extend, extend, extend it, which produced the incoherence.
Well, it is one of the most highly regarded series in history by critics, so some people thought the explanations were sufficient at least. Abrams and the writers were planning from the outset to do that many seasons and wrote a story bible outlining all the lore and mythology referenced throughout the writing. Having story arcs over the course of years was intentional and a novel idea at the time when most TV series…
Whoa, we must follow very different critics. My impression is that it's usually referenced as a joke, or as an example of how not to do things. I'm not sure I've seen it unironically praised since back when it was still airing.
Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?
#73Was it really that baffling? As a genre, film noir tends to have a twisting storyline and this was a particularly good one. But compared to, say, a Christopher Nolan or Charlie Kaufman film, this was a walk in the park.
Do Christopher Nolan films have a reputation for being baffling? I've never had that experience with them. On the other hand, we just saw The Green Knight and that one will throw you.
> On the other hand, we just saw The Green Knight and that one will throw you.
I think I'm going to need at least two more viewings to get from "OK, I see it saying a lot of things about several themes or ideas, and I can tell what at least some of those themes or ideas are, but I have only the vaguest idea what it's saying about them" to "ah, now I get it."
Great movie.
Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah yes, the famously lazy and cowardly filmmakers Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch.
I don’t think those two are a good example of the trend. Especially Lynch. While he leaves a lot of small details for interpretation, he does it from the beginning and doesn’t ask the viewers to decide between a story-changing yes/no answer like Inception. It’s like Hitchcock’s McGuffin: would be fun to know but it doesn’t detract from the story. Even Twin Peaks second season famous cliffhanger leaves no doubt about…
Admittedly, Kubrick is the better example here than Lynch: 2001 is a stellar example of both "Their motivations for doing that are up to you" (w/r/t HAL's behavior) and "It means whatever you want it to mean" (Kubrick quite famously refused to provide any sort of guidance whatsoever as to how it should be interpreted)
For Lynch, Mulholland Drive was on my mind--probably since it was mentioned in the article--as the ending (and, honestly, the narrative structure as a whole) requires the viewer to bring quite a lot of assuming and surmising to the table in order to arrive at something coherent. Perhaps the OP meant to purposefully exclude explicitly surreal and abstract works from their critique, but that's certainly not the tone I got from their post.
Perhaps a better counter example could've been Kelly Reichardt's filmography, as she is also quite clearly a meticulous and thoughtful filmmaker (I remember hearing a profile of her on some NPR show a number of years ago that talked about the amount of time she spent getting even the ambient bird songs in Certain Women accurate, or reading her comments about how she would've filmed First Cow in a different aspect ratio if she had known COVID was going to keep it from being widely seen in theaters), but typically cuts off the narrative abruptly, leaving plenty of loose ends dangling: Meek's Cutoff and First Cow are probably the best examples.
As an aside, I feel like the point of Nolan leaving the ending of Inception with an open-ended yes-no question is intended to highlight that, from the character's perspective, the answer no longer matters. I dislike the film for other reasons, and don't particularly like Nolan's screenplays in general, but that particular choice seems pretty reasonable in the broader narrative context of the film.
Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?
#75I was amazed and astonished when I first saw 'The Big Sleep', early in my college career. I'd never seen a movie I had a hard time following before, and I was captivated. There's an old Steve Yegge post where he described presenting for Jeff Bezos. I'm paraphrasing, but Yegge said something like after writing the presentation (no slides), delete every fifth paragraph to keep Bezos intrigued enough to pay attention. I…
I remember I had to watch "The Long Goodbye" with Elliot Gould three times to figure out exactly what was going on [0]. A detective job in itself.
A good movie nonetheless.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:The_Long_Goodbye_(film)#A...
Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having an "explanation" that it's all pointless magic is not an explanation. I suspect that the writers originally had a coherent story arc, but the show was so successful they had to extend, extend, extend it, which produced the incoherence.
Well, it is one of the most highly regarded series in history by critics, so some people thought the explanations were sufficient at least. Abrams and the writers were planning from the outset to do that many seasons and wrote a story bible outlining all the lore and mythology referenced throughout the writing. Having story arcs over the course of years was intentional and a novel idea at the time when most TV series…
Why do you think it's highly regarded by critics?
Final season's got a relatively low rating on rotten tomatoes.
It's referenced as a joke series in my circles, if you want to refer to something pointlessly convoluted with no pay-off.
Personally, I stopped at the beginning of season 3 when I realized the writers didn't have a clue where to go with the plot.
Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?
#77arguing that we should embrace ambiguity. This is probably my most despised media trend of the 21st century, and that's saying something. "You decide how it ended" "You decide if she lived or died" "Their motivations for doing that are up to you" "It means whatever you want it to mean" It's an excuse for lazy writing and for being too cowardly to make decisions.
This is a deeply predictable (and pedestrian) take, and I 100% expected to see it here (as I expect to see it in any technical forum). Highly technical people -- developers, engineers, etc -- are much more likely (at least in my experience) to react negatively to nonlinear storytelling. Further, the reaction is almost never "wow, not for me" but instead "THIS IS STUPID". It's essentially the equivalent of walking thr…
It's true! I awake each morning, enraged at the lack of rigour in my dreams. I turn to my wife to tell her I found it hard to suspend my disbelief. She transforms into a crab. Every night it gets worse.
Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?
#78arguing that we should embrace ambiguity. This is probably my most despised media trend of the 21st century, and that's saying something. "You decide how it ended" "You decide if she lived or died" "Their motivations for doing that are up to you" "It means whatever you want it to mean" It's an excuse for lazy writing and for being too cowardly to make decisions.
This is a deeply predictable (and pedestrian) take, and I 100% expected to see it here (as I expect to see it in any technical forum). Highly technical people -- developers, engineers, etc -- are much more likely (at least in my experience) to react negatively to nonlinear storytelling. Further, the reaction is almost never "wow, not for me" but instead "THIS IS STUPID". It's essentially the equivalent of walking thr…
You must be one of those art snobs that liked Last Year at Marienbad!
Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?
#79I was amazed and astonished when I first saw 'The Big Sleep', early in my college career. I'd never seen a movie I had a hard time following before, and I was captivated. There's an old Steve Yegge post where he described presenting for Jeff Bezos. I'm paraphrasing, but Yegge said something like after writing the presentation (no slides), delete every fifth paragraph to keep Bezos intrigued enough to pay attention. I…
The linked article reads like a pure idolization. It’s like Bible, except written not more than a thousand years ago but now, and by fishermen, but by sw engineers, the message is the same though.
Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?
#80I'm a big fan of 'The Big Sleep', Kubrick & Lynch. I also enjoy nonfiction literature that dumps you in the middle of the story. I find encountering unfamiliar words, characters, etc. interesting, and the extra work to figure out the context is satisfying. My wife, on the other hand, hates that sort of thing, such that I recognize there are works I cannot recommend to her, or movies we can only watch with my finger on a pause button, ready to explain. She's not dumb, but she certainly has less appreciation or patience to put up with that sort of thing.