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The Day Shall Come

Started by AzureSky, December 16, 2018, 08:18:05 PM

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Noodle Lizard

There's something bothering me in some of the chatter surrounding this film, about how "white liberal" audiences don't like it because it reveals uncomfortable truths they'd rather not face or whatever, whereas "black" audiences unanimously love it and absolutely get it. We keep hearing about this same "audience of 100 black people in Philadelphia" as a barometer. It all seems a bit weird and tasteless, especially for a film in which a lot of focus is placed on the concept of "otherisation" or what-have-you.

Maybe the actual "uncomfortable truth" is that some of these "white liberal" audiences are disliking it simply because it's not a very good film. It's a bad sign when Morris's interviews, where he basically just explains the true stories that inspired it with great eloquence and insight, are significantly more interesting than the film itself.

EDIT: Shite new page, sorry.

thenoise

Didn't he say similar things about Four Lions, that muslims loved it and the only people getting their knickers in a twist about it were white liberals?

Noodle Lizard

Maybe, but I can think of countless "white liberal" types who praise that movie - including the majority of this site, if I understand correctly, and I like it a lot myself. The Day Shall Come has mostly been met with ambivalence at best, the only criticisms I've seen have essentially been about it not being effective enough.

It just reminds me a little of the tone of yer Ricky Gervais or "offensive comedian" types. "Oh, people don't like it? Must be because this this and that." Nah, maybe it's just not that good. Hate to say any of this about a Chris Morris project, but it's starting to grate on me a bit.

edit: actually, you know, arsed.

McFlymo

Quote from: Noodle Lizard on October 21, 2019, 08:36:07 PM
It's a bad sign when Morris's interviews, where he basically just explains the true stories that inspired it with great eloquence and insight, are significantly more interesting than the film itself.

Yup. Listening to the recent Adam Buxton podcast I already sensed I would much rather listen to Chris Morris talk about the subject and everything he learnt during his research than actually watch the film. (Or maybe he could've put something together, similar to what Jon Ronson did with The Butterfly Effect: An episodic story, but with investigative journalism as well as interviews and character development...)

... Yeah, I didn't enjoy TDSC very much at all. The ending was so abrupt. I almost talked myself into thinking, "It's sort of like a Day Today sketch, which would sometimes end abruptly..." and thus I felt a pang of nostalgia, but nah, this was just kinda shit, really. Which is a real shame.

It just felt a bit half baked. Plenty of ideas, but the whole thing felt very disjointed and messy.


Johnny Yesno

Quote from: Noodle Lizard on October 22, 2019, 08:36:42 PM
the only criticisms I've seen have essentially been about it not being effective enough.

I've not seen the criticism elswhere but that seems to be the criticism on these boards and I agree.

When I walked out of the cinema after watching Four Lions, it was weird having laughed so hard yet being left feeling so bleak. I was impressed that he could pull off such a feat. He appears to have been attempting the same thing with TDSC, but it somehow lacks the intensity.

For example, compare the police chase in this to the Marathon in Four Lions. I didn't even realise at the time that the chase was the big build-up to the denouement. It was shot entirely from a distance, whereas you were situated within the confusion of the Marathon.

sponk

Anyone else get the feeling that Chris knows the film is a bit shite and is reluctant to push it too hard on interviews? I think he's doing promotion to honour the backers who funded the film, but deep down he'd be happy for it to sink into obscurity.

EBGB

Quote from: sponk on October 23, 2019, 04:40:06 PM
Anyone else get the feeling that Chris knows the film is a bit shite and is reluctant to push it too hard on interviews? I think he's doing promotion to honour the backers who funded the film, but deep down he'd be happy for it to sink into obscurity.

I've been to three of the London Q&As, and he's passionate (a word I usually swerve) about the subject.  I guess he's aware that he did far more research than he could remotely crowbar into the film - somewhere in an interview there's a nice comment where he says it comes with a lot of footnotes - and that the lean running time doesn't help.  And as a rabid over-researcher myself, I know that having too much material can actually weaken the final work, whatever form it's in.  But he's British, on a US topic, and white, covering the injustice done to predominantly non-whites, delivering the least laugh-a-minute, most angry piece of work he's done.  TBH I suspect it's more that he's realised it was a big ask to get a wide audience for it, and so now he's doing the promo to get people into the screenings.

Personally I started off by liking it, and I've got more from it on each subsequent viewing.  That doesn't surprise me in the slightest, given I've always found I get more from any of his work on repeat exposure.  It's not flawless, but it's a damn sight better than most people on here are giving it credit for. 

muddybug

The film has a lot of great moments and little details you'll pick up on if you re-watch it, but it's edited and put together in such an awkward way that I left feeling like I just watched something that was 80% complete.

muddybug

some delightful pictures from today




EBGB

Quote from: muddybug on October 23, 2019, 10:39:02 PM
some delightful pictures from today



LOVE that last one.  "How do we get the right backdrop for the comedy icon?  Oh yes, pop him on a chair ..."

sponk


Hey hey hey.

Long time CAB!. But great to see you are still going. Can't remember if I was still a dick when I used to post on here, so apologies in advance! 

I came here to read up on TDSC when it came out and followed the reviews as they came out and as a result, I expected it to be awful.  However, I was very surprised indeed!  What we have is one of the first and only films that deals with the horrible reality of terrorism - it is and always has been a very large component of the Problem / Reaction / Solution paradigm of the hagaelean dialectic / 'real politik' and has been since the dawn of 'democracy'.  Just do some research on it.  For example, go read the Stevens Report into the IRA Troubles, the things that stood out for me - the number of the really big bombs of the 70's and 80's that were conducted by cells that had training, funding or direction, or all three, from the UK security services. 'Our Boys' literally built the bombs that killed innocent men, women and children across the UK. Whilst the Birmingham 6 rotted in jail. They claim that it was 'to stop a greater evil' or that 'the ends justify the means' - this is standard framing and is used to condone all manner of despicable immoral acts that see lots of innocent people incarcerated and / or tortured as gristle to the mill. 

Guantanamo Bay was not the first time that industrialised torture has been used to create a pretence for the military industrial complex to enrich and empower itself.  It is the way the world works, sadly most people are ignorant of this and believe in fairy tales like Four Lions, which I really didn't like for parroting the establishment position on terror.  That all said, Chris is still aligning himself with the official narrative, which is, these things happen because of a culture of needing to make arrests and get promoted.  That's not really why it happens - where does your Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld sit in this chain of command?  They sit at the table that wants excuses to wage war, seize oil, and create blowback to justify it all.  And a post like this wouldn't be complete without a mention of Hitler, he did exactly the same thing for the Reichstag Fire - set it up, blame the jews, justify, kill millions. This is the one weak point for me - it wasn't hard enough.

Which is THE BIG PROBLEM with this film, for most people it depicts actions that are incompatible with their world views, so even a comedy FBI department would be trying to solve a real crime no? Surely they wouldn't set up innocent people with mental issues? That whole 'based on a hundred true stories' is misdirection, it is not 100 stories, it the history of international warfare.  The false flag narrative hasn't reached mainstream so the comments on here that amount to 'why would the police act this way?', are born of a lack of understanding of the way the world really works.  They had doctors in GB ensuring that victims could be tortured to the brink of death but always pulling them back for more torture, no ones heart gets to give out before they've had their fun with you.  That is a fact.  CIA invented crack to attack the nascent black power movement - again go look at CIA's own report into it when they got busted. Blah blah blah, tinfoil hat, etc, all that bollocks.  Strangely these things aren't widely reported.  For popular digestion, this film needed an act dealing solely with false flag terrorism. Otherwise it's a foreign language, wrapped in a farce, with great performances and a not heavy-handed treatment of mental illness.   

I didn't expect to hop on here and give it a good review, I wished I had watched it without knowing it was made by Chris.  I also wish he hadn't spent the last ten years on this, as the best film he could have made would have been Four Lions with this plot - ten years ago that would have been incendiary.  Now it's a bit of an after thought.  And after all the comments about the ending and the Prince song, honestly, I felt it was perfect. I didn't get the tonal inconsistencies that have been mentioned either.  I also thought it was way more consistent direction wise than Four Lions.   

That's about it from me for the next 10 years.  Best to all, keep going Neil!  And well done Chris! 

X

Glebe

It's already gone from all my local cinemas... what's even more frustrating about this is that I saw Joker (in 70mm) at the Irish Film Institute last week and it was playing in the screening room opposite. Bugger.

EBGB

Quote from: Glebe on October 30, 2019, 06:00:17 AM
It's already gone from all my local cinemas... what's even more frustrating about this is that I saw Joker (in 70mm) at the Irish Film Institute last week and it was playing in the screening room opposite. Bugger.
How annoying.  Still more unhelpfully, I think in a number of cinemas the decision was made to swap out TDSC for extra screenings of 'Joker'.  The Barbican in London had been plugging TDSC as scheduled from release, but then it suddenly disappeared completely from the listings even before Oct 11th.  And I saw various complaints on social media from people who'd travelled a decent distance (two hours, in one case) for screenings around the UK only to find it had been pulled.  I learned the hard way a few years ago with 'The Master' that this happens - I get that it's a business decision, but it's incredibly unsupportive of more niche films, which surely undermines the long term case for independent cinemas?

Also, the non-CM publicity campaign was rubbish.  There's flying below the radar when making the thing, but it seems like an awful lot of fans didn't know about the film until after release.  When it's only shown for 1-2 weeks anywhere, that's not helpful.  I'd still like to know why the release date was shifted from Sep 27th - I wonder if that impacted coverage and cinema scheduling?

dallasman

Doesn't look like it'll be shown on Norwegian cinemas at all. Thank God for the internet, eh? I have to say, my initial response when I heard the plot synopsis was basically "huh?", and then "uh-oh", and though I did give the movie a fair chance and then some, I mostly stand by that prereview.

It's extremely close to 4L, for one thing. And the interesting story at its core - the FBI's outrageous manipulation and escalation - is bundled up with a story that makes little to no sense, and features no sympathetic characters. And that's if you stick to just the Florida plot. But Morris also peppers in amusing details from other cases; some to make the feds look even more craven, some to make the "terrorists" look more sympathetic or kookier, depending on the scene.

Just thought of a good analogy: Imagine making a film from one of Jon Ronson's books, where the only dialogue is what he quotes verbatim. In other words, "The Men Who Stare At Goats" starring Ewan McGregor, only more so. All the highlights, strung together more or less in order, but with some liberties taken as to who actually did and said what. Take that approach with Ronson's Tottenham Ayatollah, throw in CM's "jihadi bloopers reel" and you're pretty close to 4L already.

But as people have said, the Four Lions crew were halfway sympathetic and somewhat recognizable. At least people know about Islam, and most of CMs audience would probably be familiar enough to follow the jihadi arguments (and see where they part ways with plausibility).

In TDSC, it's immediately made clear that Moses hates white people and wants them out of his neighbourhood. The words "European" and "gentrification" are used, but the real-life Moses adopted these ideas from black supremacist theory. If Moses had been written as white, he might've founds bits of inspiration in the teachings of people like Alex Jones, Jared Taylor and Timothy McVeigh. Rather than an especially pious believer of an identifiable faith, he's a self-made, syncretic prophet whose two or three followers appear to be mentally disabled (until they're required to deliver an on-point wisecrack). In time-honoured tradition, he mixes charity work, activism, ritual, persecution narratives, conspiracy theory and whatever else comes to mind, because he's a fraud and a hate monger. He commits to violent action early on, and shows himself willing to follow through at the end. So there's that.

Then there's the issue of whether he's completely delusional/paranoid schizofrenic, just stupidly persuaded by nonsense he reads, or making all this shit up to amuse himself, with no ultimate purpose beyond vandalism. The first option seems the most reasonable, but as others have also pointed out, there's no real sense of anguish, confusion or anything to suggest that we should sympathise with him for those kinds of reasons. The movie seems to want us to settle for the second, maybe with a dash of the other two, but I feel like it badly and repeatedly misses the mark in establishing a believable connection between Moses' general demeanour, his words and his actions. Character motivation is the term I'm looking for, I guess.

Marchant Davis does what he can to smooth out the inconsistencies with a winning performance, but that in itself becomes weird and distracting when his character acts and speaks so inconsistently. The family scenes with Daniele Orange are genuinely sweet, but I wanted to tear my hair out at the same time. When their seance thing (I forget the specifics atm) doesn't do anything, Moses shrugs it off with a smile that seems to say "Ah well, it's my job to do these kooky things now, so we had to try, but it's all nonsense really". And she's presented as down-to-earth, no-nonsense, standard issue wife who basically shares or at least accepts any outlandish proposition he springs on her.

And I too was doing my darnedest to go along with it and shrug it off for as long as I could, but with the FBI agents acting even less believably, and seemingly operating out of an abandoned hospital, the annoyances were adding up. Had the focus been squarely on their slightly embellished machinations, played out straight, it might have worked a lot better. But I guess since it's the Veep man, we need the Veep magic, and that means mind-numbingly elaborate insults, crammed into every exchange!!! I find Anna Kendrick hard to hate, but she, her unlikeable, unfunny boss and idiot colleagues are all in "Veep, but it's the FBI". It's unfunny Four Lions meets unfunny Veep, basically.

I give it an 8/10.

btw, didn't even notice James Adomian was in this until the credits, but I guess he played the cop who delivered the crudely inserted wokeness near the end there? They could've done a huge collective laugh and freeze-frame there (Police Squad-style), and the movie would've been at least 15% better.

muddybug



Glebe

Quote from: EBGB on October 30, 2019, 06:31:31 AMHow annoying.  Still more unhelpfully, I think in a number of cinemas the decision was made to swap out TDSC for extra screenings of 'Joker'.  The Barbican in London had been plugging TDSC as scheduled from release, but then it suddenly disappeared completely from the listings even before Oct 11th.  And I saw various complaints on social media from people who'd travelled a decent distance (two hours, in one case) for screenings around the UK only to find it had been pulled.  I learned the hard way a few years ago with 'The Master' that this happens - I get that it's a business decision, but it's incredibly unsupportive of more niche films, which surely undermines the long term case for independent cinemas?

Also, the non-CM publicity campaign was rubbish.  There's flying below the radar when making the thing, but it seems like an awful lot of fans didn't know about the film until after release.  When it's only shown for 1-2 weeks anywhere, that's not helpful.  I'd still like to know why the release date was shifted from Sep 27th - I wonder if that impacted coverage and cinema scheduling?

Yeah, it's very annoying. I thought I'd still have time to catch it, but it's just disappeared over here. As you say, while Morris himself has been doing a lot of interviews and there's been the odd article, there otherwise hasn't been a huge amount of promotion for the film. I know it's a 'small' movie, but you would expect a Chris Morris production to be given a bit more of a push.


rue the polywhirl

Just saw this in a rare as hens teeth showing in my area. Absolutely delightful film. Looks great and so much tighter and funnier than four lions. Kayvan Novak was the one major link of mediocrity but other than that a really sharp script and great performances nearly most of the cast. Good pacing with no baggage if anything it was too brief.  Criminal that it's got 5.8 on IMDb, it should easily get 7.8.

muddybug

#382
https://nfts.co.uk/blog/nfts-students-attend-jam-packed-masterclass-chris-morris

QuoteWith The Day Shall Come nine years in the making, Jon asked the burning question: what's next for Chris? "I've got various projects I'm working on. There are certain subjects that exceed the bounds of film and are better as a six part series.  I'm open to either!"

!!!!!!

also this isn't surprising, but it may be the first time he's said it...

QuoteAsked by Jon whether it still holds true that comedy should have a purpose, Chris said: "Purpose can be internally self-justifying. You can use it to drive yourself through something if you need more than 'this might make people laugh.' You need an anger at something or a belief in trying to fix something, it is useful to get you through a lot of work."

Ballad of Ballard Berkley


mojo filters

On The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell telecasting from 30 Rock in NYC tonight, Ron Klain (generic Democratic pundit, ex-chief of staff to VPs Al Gore and Joe Biden) just (presumably) unwittingly said with a curiously profound enunciation that the day shall come!

Unfortunately he was just talking about ramifications of today's congressional impeachment testimony. I have no evidence he was also subtly referencing the film, but it would be nice to think the audience and appreciation is wider than we think...


Noodle Lizard

Quote from: mojo filters on November 22, 2019, 03:35:28 AM
On The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell telecasting from 30 Rock in NYC tonight, Ron Klain (generic Democratic pundit, ex-chief of staff to VPs Al Gore and Joe Biden) just (presumably) unwittingly said with a curiously profound enunciation that the day shall come!

Unfortunately he was just talking about ramifications of today's congressional impeachment testimony. I have no evidence he was also subtly referencing the film, but it would be nice to think the audience and appreciation is wider than we think...

I think it's a Biblical quote, isn't it? Certainly seems to bring up a lot of God-bothering on a YouTube search.

EBGB

Quote from: Noodle Lizard on November 26, 2019, 07:49:20 AM
I think it's a Biblical quote, isn't it?

Just a tad. Annoyingly the search ignores quote marks to force looking for the complete string, but it's easy enough to Ctrl F for examples.

https://www.bible.com/en-GB/search/bible?q=%22the%20day%20shall%20come%22

EBGB

Lewes Q&A showing in December at the top notch Depot Cinema.

https://lewesdepot.org/film/the-day-shall-come

TrenterPercenter

Went to showing of TDSC and Q&A at the Midlands Arts Centre.

Really surpassed my expectations, both the film and the Q&A after.  Morris came across as just generally awesome human being which made me practically glow with all the recent heros turning out to be a bit shit.  There was a warmth and empathy to how he spoke but with resolve for the families destroyed by the entrapment.

I was visibly buzzing for a few hours after friends said.