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Under the Silver Lake

Started by Pearly-Dewdrops Drops, May 17, 2019, 05:51:41 AM

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Anyone seen it? Stars Andrew Garfield and is written/directed by the It Follows guy (though it has little to nothing in common with that).

Damn, I think this is the funnest movie I've seen in years. I don't want to even say more about it, just go and rent it without reading anything about it. Recommended for fans of energetic oddball movies that are extremely divisive.

In a just world Andrew Garfield would be winning awards for this, but we live in an unjust world where A24 dumped it onto VOD without even a real theatrical run.

Five bags of popcorn (and maybe a little Spiderman action figure in honor of the great Andrew Garfield).

Don't even watch the trailer, it's better if you know nothing about the plot going in.

Blumf

RLM have put up a review of it, they like it. Seems the half-arsed release is down to it tanking at Cannes, a lot of people don't seem to get it, apparently. Also sounds like Amazon Prime bollocksed up the encode of it, so maybe look elsewhere.

I'm certainly interested. Haven't seen it yet, but as Pearly says, probably best to go in as cold as possible (so don't watch that RLM review)

hedgehog90

First time I've paused a Half in the Bag before spoilers in order to watch the film they were reviewing.
Looks interesting.

rasta-spouse

I had a lot of fun watching this. It's a shame this film is being overlooked. Much better than the very knowing It Follows. Seems like the director threw in a lot of stuff he liked from the nineties. Loved the song choice from Monster at the end and the wobbly early MTV-style graphics. 

Don't know if David Mitchell is the type to make a sequel, but Garfield's almost sociopathic loser fuckboy lead and the weird mythology in this film have the legs for it.

Sebastian Cobb

Mark Kermode tore this a new arsehole.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

Mark Kermode thinks The Exorcist is the best film ever.

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on May 17, 2019, 02:49:03 PM
Mark Kermode tore this a new arsehole.

I read his review and can't even tell what he disliked about it, as if he didn't even watch the movie.

In fact his one jab about this being a "pre-Times Up" movie with regard to women suggest that the entire fucking movie sailed over his head like Father Karras flying out the window.

Anyway, this is the kind of movie that has a ton of ambiguities and loose threads (like David Lynch) and people are either going to give it 1 star or 10 stars.

rasta-spouse

Mark Kermode is boring.

He's so boring he was in a band with David Baddiel. Can you imagine it?

hedgehog90

Watched this last night.
Enjoyable, somewhat Netflixy. By that I mean it lacked a certain oomph that I expect from a film, but it flowed nicely. I can't imagine this playing in cinemas very well.
I enjoyed the humour and the way it didn't take itself too seriously. Garfield was great. The film-making style wasn't particularly unique or compelling, but it struck a pleasing chord, somewhere between hipster mumblecore and neo-noir.
Overall, it was a decent bit of fun, nothing extraordinary.
7/10

Spoilers now:

There's lots of references to old cinema, comic books and Christianity throughout, but I'm not sure what to make of it all.
Is it silly to interpret Dog Killer as God Killer? After all, culture is his religion, he beats gold-shitting Jesus until he's bloody in the face and then he kills the God of music in the face with the prophet Kurt Cobain's guitar.
And continuing with the dog/god/playing records backwards line of thinking, the parrot is clearly saying Oliver, right? Oliver backwards is Revilo. There was an author & commentator with the palindromic name, Revilo P. Oliver, who gained notoriety in the 60's after publishing one of the first JFK conspiracy theories, arguably the template for what we think of now as the modern day conspiracy theory. He was also a white nationalist according to Wikipedia. No idea if or how it relates at all. This is all off the top of my head btw, I suspect I'm waffling some bollocks right now.

All these secret codes, numerology and code breaking methods depicted, I tried to entertain some of it at first.
Take 751, 7 = Sevence, 5 = the five contact lenses on the billboard, 'I can see clearly now' woman getting married appears to know Garfield's character somehow, and 1 = the owl on the dollar bill? They all relate to one another to a degree I guess.
There's also the The 3 figurines of actresses with coded messages beneath their names. Are they decodable? What's that all about?

I suspect all of this is designed to encourage us to think like the protagonist, but the content of these hidden messages (if there are any) aren't important.

Quote from: hedgehog90 on May 18, 2019, 02:24:43 PM
Watched this last night.
Enjoyable, somewhat Netflixy. By that I mean it lacked a certain oomph that I expect from a film, but it flowed nicely. I can't imagine this playing in cinemas very well.
I enjoyed the humour and the way it didn't take itself too seriously. Garfield was great. The film-making style wasn't particularly unique or compelling, but it struck a pleasing chord, somewhere between hipster mumblecore and neo-noir.
Overall, it was a decent bit of fun, nothing extraordinary.
7/10

Really? I don't get Netflixy or hipster mumblecore at all. I think a lot of viewers can't get past Andrew Garfield's character maybe. The movie is impeccably made and to me at least the style is totally unique, the only comparisons I could draw while watching it are to David Lynch.

I'm convinced 10-15 years from now this will be viewed as a major movie like the slowburn of critical consensus that took place with "Fire Walk With Me"

Quote from: hedgehog90 on May 18, 2019, 02:24:43 PM
Spoilers now:

There's lots of references to old cinema, comic books and Christianity throughout, but I'm not sure what to make of it all.
Is it silly to interpret Dog Killer as God Killer? After all, culture is his religion, he beats gold-shitting Jesus until he's bloody in the face and then he kills the God of music in the face with the prophet Kurt Cobain's guitar.
And continuing with the dog/god/playing records backwards line of thinking, the parrot is clearly saying Oliver, right? Oliver backwards is Revilo. There was an author & commentator with the palindromic name, Revilo P. Oliver, who gained notoriety in the 60's after publishing one of the first JFK conspiracy theories, arguably the template for what we think of now as the modern day conspiracy theory. He was also a white nationalist according to Wikipedia. No idea if or how it relates at all. This is all off the top of my head btw, I suspect I'm waffling some bollocks right now.

All these secret codes, numerology and code breaking methods depicted, I tried to entertain some of it at first.
Take 751, 7 = Sevence, 5 = the five contact lenses on the billboard, 'I can see clearly now' woman getting married appears to know Garfield's character somehow, and 1 = the owl on the dollar bill? They all relate to one another to a degree I guess.
There's also the The 3 figurines of actresses with coded messages beneath their names. Are they decodable? What's that all about?

I suspect all of this is designed to encourage us to think like the protagonist, but the content of these hidden messages (if there are any) aren't important.

[Spoilers] There seem to be a lot of deliberate ambiguities (again like a Lynch movie) that leave things open for the audience to interpret. That's aided by Andrew Garfield being an unreliable protagonist/narrator of sorts. For example, it's left open whether Andrew Garfield may in fact be the Dog Killer, perhaps taking out his anger at his ex-girlfriend billboard lady and women in general by murdering dogs at night.