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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?

#131

Post by yumaikas »

WalterBright wrote: post #50
yumaikas wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much of "smart" is due to his power, and how much of it is due to his intellect. I say this not because I don't believe he doesn't have an impressive intellect, but because, well, what if someone had his intellect, but worked in an Amazon warehouse due to circumstances outside of their control?

Being smart isn't good enough. One must also be motivated, be willing to put in the effort, and not be discouraged by repeated failure. I had a friend once who was very smart. He was always starting new projects to make money, and always quit at the first or second obstacle.

And have the spare resources on hand to be able to survive repeated failures, for that matter. And not be dealing with ADHD or other mental issues.

In the back of my head I want to tease out how much of Beso's success is due to aptitude, how much is due to work, how much is due to privilege, and how much is due to luck, and how much is due to ruthlessness.

This might be a futile exercise, all told, but I do think all of those factors have played into his success.

And I wonder how his success and the other factors compound in the perception people have of him.

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

#133

Post by lmm »

ubermonkey wrote: post #14
Causality1 wrote: post #3

arguing 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…

> Years ago, I saw a play by Maria Irene Fornes called THE DANUBE. It's a bizarre, baffling, and beautiful piece, and you cannot really approach it like you would (say) a Marvel film expecting a traditional narrative. That's not what it's FOR. It's an experience. You have to let go of the desire to tick off plot points and characters like players in a football program and just experience the art on its own terms.

> Exploring these kinds of challenging works can be incredibly rewarding. I encourage anyone reading this to do so. I long ago decided that if I only ever saw plays/read books/watched movies that I liked, I wasn't branching out enough. Find things that challenge you, and engage them on their own terms. Figure out why (for example) a host of professional movie critics loved Lynch's film when it left you cold and maybe even angry. What do they see that you don't?

I've had that experience. But I've had it in response to many phenomena, artificial and natural, not just critically respected artworks. If you approach other things on the same terms, you can find the same depth and reward - even when there's no there there.

> Creating something that includes, or even hinges on, ambiguity is challenging in the extreme. It's like when jazz musicians break the "rules" of music and melody; you can only break the rules and have it work when you have really mastered the underlying craft.

Citation needed. The effectiveness of GPT etc. suggest that poetic ambiguity may be the cheap trick that many of us have long thought it was; similarly I've seen a few cases where when a critic takes schizophrenic writings seriously and has much the same response as they do to respected artists. Has anyone actually done a double-blind trial comparing "good" and "bad" high-ambiguity works? (e.g. if you make those professional movie critics write their responses independently, without knowledge of the creators, and then compare those responses in an objective way, are they actually more correlated than chance?)

In a world where ambiguity didn't actually take a lot of artistic skill, and whether a high-ambiguity work was perceived as good or bad was more a function of art-community politics (e.g. who the creator is), what would you expect to be different?

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

#134

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

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…

Yeah, that intro to Dark City was a crime against the audience. And honestly I think it was really shortsighted/cowardly of the studio. If you look at two movies that came just a year later, The Matrix and Sixth Sense, a big surprise reveal was central to both of their appeal. And this shouldn't have been a surprise to the studios... the twist in The Usual Suspects came half a decade earlier, not to mention Empire Strikes Back.

My second least favorite thing studios do is cut the trailer in a way that makes the movie seem totally different or even a totally different genre.

Aside: a friend gave me the Sixth Sense dvd as a birthday gift one year, which I had yet to see, and my idiot roommate at that time was in the room couldn't restrain himself from trying to cleverly address my friend in a way that communicated he knew the twist. Except he'd never touched on clever in his life and gave it away instantly. Nice one Paul. Nice one.

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

#135

Post by perl4ever »

SkittyDog wrote: post #125
perl4ever wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quote about "the difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense" has been around in some form for around two centuries in western culture. References: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/07/15/truth-stranger/ https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Quotes/RealityIsUnrea... The quote from Lynch makes it sound as though the obvious way to get people to accept an implausible story didn't occu…

I'm familiar with both quotes, but I think we're barking up the wrong tree by trying to intepret them literally. "Based on a true story" is not what makes a film plausible to us... We instinctively engage in a willing suspension of disbelief when we're prompted by literature, even when we directly know that the story is false. Fargo includes that text because the film is an homage to the hardboiled crime fiction genr…

>"Based on a true story" is not what makes a film plausible to us

It wasn't the only thing that made Fargo seem plausible.

But it permitted people to suspend disbelief, because it was enough like a weird news story.

Saying the same thing about Raising Arizona wouldn't make it realistic, granted.

And it isn't license to tell any story that is true, no matter how unbelievable.

>You've misunderstood what Nicola Morgan is talking about, in that quote.

That quote was from the TV tropes link. I don't think I misunderstood it. I acknowledge the "job" you state. My point, or a point, was, that Lynch appeared to be complaining about doing that fundamental job.

If you want to be pedantic, better to tell me something about Lynch, because I have only read about him.

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

#136

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

perl4ever wrote: post #116
mr_toad wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For most of history this was how people viewed life and death. If you tried telling them it was just nature, bad luck, and an uncaring universe they would have viewed you as a naive simpleton.

> uncaring universe What "caring universe" do you measure things against to see it's not caring? How can you have yin without yang, in other words?

This is a classic philosophical argument that was dispensed with in the middle ages. The usual form of it is "how can you know what infinity is if infinity doesn't exist?" The answer is as simple as "I take the word finite and put the word not in front of it." We are perfectly capable of synthesizing concepts that do not exist in our experience of reality.

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

#137

Post by perl4ever »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #136
perl4ever wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> uncaring universe What "caring universe" do you measure things against to see it's not caring? How can you have yin without yang, in other words?

This is a classic philosophical argument that was dispensed with in the middle ages. The usual form of it is "how can you know what infinity is if infinity doesn't exist?" The answer is as simple as "I take the word finite and put the word not in front of it." We are perfectly capable of synthesizing concepts that do not exist in our experience of reality.

>We are perfectly capable of synthesizing concepts that do not exist in our experience of reality.

I am not sure exactly what this means, but I don't think I asserted anything to the contrary.

An automaton or a parrot can place words next to each other without "synthesizing concepts". Can an intelligent being not do that too?

As another application of my original point, "synthesizing concepts" would not mean anything unless it was possible (and I think it is) to not synthesize a concept when a string of symbols is put together.

It's not that we have to have a caring universe to imagine one, it's that we have to at least imagine one in order to say the universe is not caring.

One way to look at the universe we live in is that it seems to be faithful. Every atom follows physical law perfectly, at least we assume. Maybe that's not exactly proven, but it's the conventional faith today, and we certainly can imagine the world otherwise, with lots of miracles.

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

#138

Post by bmitc »

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…

The advice to arbitrarily delete every third paragraph makes zero sense. That whole piece is just cult of personality. The advice is also an insult to real writers who know how to actually craft intriguing stories.

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

#139

Post by bmitc »

monkeyfacebag wrote: post #25
blowski wrote: post #2

Was 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.

Nolan's films are not baffling in the sense of creating true mystery or intrigue. They are baffling because they truly are a mess and have inaudible dialog, and that's despite being famous for having tedious monologues.
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