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The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

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Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#101

Post by hmsshagatsea »

at_a_remove wrote: post #41

Take Dark City . I believe the studio forced a new opening that more or less explained everything rather than letting you puzzle it all out. I didn't find the movie too hard to work through, but I think Hollywood execs have a fairly low estimation of the audience's intellect. Lynch is a bit harder. Lynch is atypical in two ways that play off of one another. First and most obviously, he has been developing as a film-m…

Dark City’s changes, like most of the time a studio interferes with a creator’s vision, is all about profitability. It’s too risky financially to make a film that does not have wide appeal. It’s nothing personal, just business. And when they test these films they take any criticism rather harshly. They simply don’t have the time or the foresight to find out if people will like it after a little bit.

Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#102

Post by troutwine »

newsbinator wrote: post #92
troutwine wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sense does getting wiped out by a plague make?

You could look at it a dozen different ways, depending on your sense-making framework: * God did it (makes sense- God does cataclysmic stuff) * Nature did it (makes sense- biology is a jerk and we haven't mastered it yet) * Humans did it by mistake (makes sense- we make huge errors all the time) * etc

Sure. In the context of Lynch's work things that happen without sense are often intra-textual in his work or hint at some interior sense that is obscure to the characters, audience. Why do characters (dead!) from Twin Peaks show up in Mulholland Drive? Well, that _might_ be touched on in Twin Peaks season 3 or maybe it isn't. Kinda up to you.

Seems to me that's Lynch's point. In daily life we're all willing to accept on some level that we need to make sense of things ourselves so why should we expect art to be direct?

Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#103

Post by yupper32 »

nl wrote: post #90
yupper32 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really dislike this take. Listen, it's fine if people enjoy nonlinear storytelling to make it an "experience" or a canvas with a few straight lines painted on it. But it is stupid, to follow your quote. If you're using devices to make a story more difficult to follow, just for the sake of making it more difficult to follow for the "challenge", then that's stupid. I'm not claiming The Big Sleep is even in this categ…

> Listen, it's fine if people enjoy nonlinear storytelling to make it an "experience" or a canvas with a few straight lines painted on it. But it is stupid, to follow your quote. Why? Mondrian painting are the most beautiful, calming pieces of art I know of (just look at Composition C (No. III) with Red, Yellow and Blue) > If you're using devices to make a story more difficult to follow, just for the sake of making i…

> Mondrian painting are the most beautiful, calming pieces of art I know of (just look at Composition C (No. III) with Red, Yellow and Blue)

And it sold for $50 million, which is the stupid part here. The value is not in the piece itself. We're getting a bit distracted talking about paintings though.

> Think harder levels in video games, rules in sports and games etc.

The equivalent here would be a nearly impossible game. One that doesn't tell you the goal or the controls. And you randomly jump from level 1 to level 400 to level 33.

And then some silly pretentious person says "Well why does the game need to be linear?" "You know just like real life you have to figure out the controls!" "It's not actually meant to be played" "The challenge is figuring out what's going on"

That'd be stupid. Is there a niche of people that would like it? Probably.

> You seem to be using the word "stupid" to mean something like "non-obvious". That isn't what "stupid" means.

Stupid isn't a great word for this, I just used it to follow the person I was responding to.

"Extremely Pretentious", maybe? "Ridiculous"?

Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#104

Post by version_five »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #89
twelvechairs wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TV has shifted this way, where its now common to have long running series where different writers, directors, etc. across every episode. Everything is logical in its immediate context but can seem illogical in the broader context of the entire series/show.

Yes, lots of characters change at random, just when you think you know them.

I find this in a lot of Netflix shows, where the season is ostensibly building to some revelation about who the killer or mole or whoever is, but each episode plays out like it was based only on prompts from the previous ones and not according to some planned story arc. At the end you don't see everything fall into place, you learn that there was a relationship that was not alluded to in any way through the rest of the season that suddenly makes someone the killer.

Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#105

Post by xsmasher »

asdff wrote: post #68
WalterBright wrote: post #59

Earlier 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…

> 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.

Citation? There's a PDF floating around somewhere of the pitch for season one or the pilot; it specifically says that the SHOULD plan the mystery in advance... but then they failed to do that.

Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#106

Post by Graffur »

pjmorris wrote: post #9

I 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…

That post is cringe inducing. Yegge had to put himself down " I don’t know why it’s not in there. It should be. I’m a dork." to keep Bezos happy?

Let's face it: Bezos isn't some alien from another planet. He's privileged and lucky. He's lucky he had engineers come and help him build his company.

Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#107

Post by ubermonkey »

yupper32 wrote: post #33
ubermonkey wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I really dislike this take. Listen, it's fine if people enjoy nonlinear storytelling to make it an "experience" or a canvas with a few straight lines painted on it. But it is stupid, to follow your quote. If you're using devices to make a story more difficult to follow, just for the sake of making it more difficult to follow for the "challenge", then that's stupid. I'm not claiming The Big Sleep is even in this categ…

You're mistaking the point of a (notionally) narrative medium. It doesn't HAVE to be linear storytelling.

Difficult texts are their own reward. Not everything has to spoon-feed you the plot. And enjoying things like a Lynch film doesn't mean you don't also enjoy highly conventional narratives like the aforementioned Marvel films.

>If a canvas painted a solid color or with a few straight lines sells for millions, then that's stupid.

Thank god we have you here to explain how the experts are all just plain wrong!

Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#108

Post by ubermonkey »

yupper32 wrote: post #48
BoiledCabbage wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're using devices to make a story more difficult to follow, just for the sake of making it more difficult to follow for the "challenge", then that's stupid. I don't know you, and even I know you disagree with your own statement. If not, the only thing you'd enjoy are media targeted at pre-schoolers and young children. Anything targeting and age beyond that is made more difficult to follow, by design to make i…

> If not, the only thing you'd enjoy are media targeted at pre-schoolers and young children. Oh come on, you know I wasn't talking about that kind of challenge. There are two things: 1. Pieces that are more challenging to read/watch because the story is deeper and the challenging read is required to tell that story. 2. A piece that purposely makes it the story harder to follow, or is otherwise really difficult to fol…

...and we all know that a genre film cannot also be challenging!

Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#109

Post by ubermonkey »

legerdemain wrote: post #78
ubermonkey wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Never seen it, but always wanted to!

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but I do want to point out that there definitely ARE a lot of people who immediately ascribe snobbery to folks who enjoy complex film, or art that requires thought, or wine above two-buck-chuck, or beer other than Miller Lite, or whatever.

It's a pretty silly thing to do (and one that I'm pretty sure you're doing only in jest, let me be clear).

Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#110

Post by ubermonkey »

thom wrote: post #77
ubermonkey wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You. I like you.
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