For you kids that aren’t into the whole brevity thing and love the normal Cinecast conversations that are lengthy enough to get you through a train ride halfway across Europe, you’re out of luck this week. Being that we’re knee-deep in Shinsedai Film Festival content and pre-production on a week long Christopher Nolan retrospective, we gotta keep things short. So it’s basically a shouting match about Oliver Stone’s newest film, Savages and then it’s adios. Come back next week and we should have a bit more content.
Please excuse the microphone malfunction (42:44) – the transition might seem a little jarring. Our apologies.
As always, feel free to join the conversation by leaving your own thoughts in the comment section below and again, thanks for listening!
http://rowthree.com/audio/cinecast_12/episode_265.mp3
Full show notes are under the seats…
IN-HOUSE BUSINESS:
– Shinsedai Film Festival coverage
– Christopher Nolan all next week on RowThree
– Prometheus episode of Matt’s “Cabin in the Woods” podcast series
MAIN REVIEW:
– Savages
DVDs/NETFLIX INSTANT NOW AVAILABLE:
Jandy’s DVD Triage
NEXT WEEK:
To Rome with Love
Bernie
Killer Joe
PRIVATE COMMENTS or QUESTIONS?
Leave your thoughts in the comment section below, or email us:
feedback@rowthree.com (general)
andrew.james@rowthree.com
kurt@rowthree.com
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Kurt: Twitter, G+, Letterboxd
Matt: Twitter, LetterBoxd
RowThree: Twitter, G+, Letterboxd
Cant wait for the Nolan retrospective! I still need to watch Following, having never seen it before.
I watched it on Netflix last week. It’s quite rough around the edges, but it turned out to be very good.
I really liked Savages, but I found myself agreeing with Matt for most of the discussion about Stone’s intent. For example, I think that opening narration – including the “Wargasm” line – was very sincere. I have to admit though, Kurt’s views are always . . . interesting. He loves to go three, four levels deep.
That being said, I’m more like Andrew in that I don’t care what the director intent was (most of the time, anyway). I like this movie, though I really don’t know why. I agree with almost all of Matt’s criticisms, and I don’t like this movie ironically – I just like it.
Oh, and you guys have to go see Bernie in the theater if you still can – not that you have to see in in the theater, but you will regret it (some) if you don’t. Bernie is the one movie this year that can’t be oversold.
Kurt, are we going to get reviews of the books you read in your travel?
Yeah, I think Andrew is viewing the film the way the director intended, as a cool, gritty action film. And if people like it that way, fine. But Kurt’s perspective is once again “off the rails” as we say.
And I know Kurt and I talk about it more when Andrew’s mic breaks, but Stone really is kind of the cinematic equivalent of nails on chalkboard for me. No matter what the hell he is saying, it is a struggle for me not to be driven nuts by it. And as he’s gotten older its just seemed to have gotten worse, as he seems to either have lost the ability, or just doesn’t give a fuck, about trying to filter himself.
This could happen next show…
The last two were China Mieville’s EMBASSY TOWN and Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One.
To be clear, I agree with Matt completely about the opening 10 minutes or so. It’s terrible, overblown horseshit that I think is intended to be sincere. I fucking hated it and was worried about the rest of the movie.
But that’s just it; that’s only the first ten minutes and then the narration completely disappears and that character very nearly disappears too. So the rest of the film I was able to enjoy it for what it was: just a very simple (yes, simple) action/thriller. It’s not convoluted or messy. It’s just got several characters all vying for something different but within the context of the pawn’s (Blake Lively) abduction.
Outside of that opening (and actually I wasn’t a huge fan of the ending either), everything else I though was pretty awesome.
To be clear, I stopped reading this comment after “I agree with Matt completely.”
A winner is me!
Classic.
(I feel that is how too many of our conversations go…)
Only when the mic is recording.
Loving the Goodfellas. As always, great work Andrew.
But really, Gamble should have been Joe Pesci with all that yelling….remembering that Leathal Weapon 2, “They fuck you at the drive-thru” speech, that is often how Gamble yells…
Well, they do.
. . . And time slowly passes as we all await The Dark Knight Rises.
Kurt and Andrew you guys sound like the friends I had in high school constantly trying to tell me that The BOONDOCK SAINTS was the COOL AND AWESOME.
Oliver Stone to me is Troy Duffy if he got to make more than 2 movies.
I’m relatively certain they both love Boondock Saints.
Heh. Not so much, Boondock Saints is pretty hollow filmmaking and simply isn’t at all fun, being obsessed with be ‘cool.’ but not pulling it off.
Savages (to me) was not obsessed with being cool. It was ironic and detached from the get go.
No, I found Boondock Saints to be kind of boring for some reason. Can’t really remember it all that well, but it was not as cool as everyone seems to claim it is.
Halfway through Savages review and not having seen it gotta think Gamble is right. Kurt and Andrew love Domino, if Savages is “great” in the way of Domino, then trash is garbage.
On Oliver Stone, I long ago went to a talk of his and it was framed as being about the movies of Oliver Stone along with his new book, and with the exception of the Q&A portion, he didn’t talk at all about movies, just the book. To me Oliver Stone and Michael Ruppert (of Collapse) are very similar characters, they both wrestle with their egos in trying to earnestly articulate a point. I see Stone as an auteur, he is repeatedly putting his voice in the mouths of characters, he wears his heart on his sleeve and most of the time his films suffer from it.
I think JFK is a fucking masterpiece but it does play as a conspiracy fever dream, which is in Stone’s wheelhouse and so works exceedingly well as that. Also just because he has an agenda, does not necessarily negate his agenda, I generally agree with his perspective on American politics. But he does have a feverish way of expressing it.
Oliver Stone is also a class A asshole, a la Michael Moore.
Moore may be an asshole, but his documentaries are entertaining as hell.
It generally doesn’t matter to me if the filmmaker is an asshole if the film is any good. I think Tarantino is an asshole and has a self-aggrandized view of himself, but he still makes great films.
You got to get your douchebag switch fixed