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March 28, 2024, 11:06:53 PM

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How do You Define a 'Proper' Film?

Started by Blumf, April 09, 2021, 11:08:28 AM

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Blumf

Quote from: Magnum Valentino on April 09, 2021, 01:42:07 PM
Correct me if I'm wrong Blumf (please do), but I took it more like what you're talking about is the perception that governs why we see Sharknado differently to Raging Bull, right?

Pretty much. Kermit's Steven Seagal comparison gets it too.

I think it's ultimately a question of where you draw the line, and how hazy it is.

greenman

#31
Quote from: Blumf on April 09, 2021, 02:04:54 PM
Pretty much. Kermit's Steven Seagal comparison gets it too.

I think it's ultimately a question of where you draw the line, and how hazy it is.

Its always going to be hazy but again I think its perhaps a little clearer if you judge it via the genesis of a production? maybe less so it the scripting as they can be repurposed heavily but in terms of the funding there does seem to be more of an art/entertainment divide there. Doesnt mean the film result can be so easily judged but does I think maybe help you understand how it got were it did.

Terminator was always going to be a film about a robo monster chasing people with gun action in it, doesnt mean it didnt also have a lot of dramatic depth or intelligence to it in the end but I would say those things were not automatic inclusions.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

If Bruce Willis is involved, but he clearly doesn't want to be, it's not a proper film. That is the only clear cut metric.

The rest is a mixture of production values, narrative scope/ambition and whether seeing it at the cinema would feel like a waste of time/money.

Johnboy

There does seem like theres potential to move away from that, a production isn't so clearly limited to a cinematic of tv episode length, we could have 7 hour films or 65 min films, we could have TV series made up of 2 hour long episodes, etc.
[/quote]

Yes I'd love if more self contained films were around 70 mins

Magnum Valentino


chveik

Quote from: St_Eddie on April 09, 2021, 01:18:57 PM
I'll leave them to it, as I'll be too busy thoroughly enjoying one of the greatest MOVIES ever made, popcorn in hand.


Goldentony

Police Academy - Film
Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment - Film
Police Academy 3: Back In Training - Movie
Police Academy 4: Citizens On Patrol - MOVIE
Police Academy 5: Assignment Miami Beach - Film
Police Academy 6: City Under Siege - Movie
Police Academy 7: Mission To Moscow - Film

sevendaughters

I don't.

Not trying to be needlessly shoulder-shruggy - I understand the question - I just don't really respect the distinction. I lecture in Film Studies but that takes in television, streaming, popcorn, 'content', cult, "proper cinema". People try to define the cinematic but to me it's just a distracting question that I think leaves us nowhere.

If you start saying it's what it is shot on then are you saying that Film has ended or is about to end because digital is taking over? I think that is hokum.

If you start saying it is narrative moving images that show some kind of 'quality' then again, you're in a pointless elitist navel gaze that we can avoid by looking at the deathly-dull 'what is the literary' conversation in English. Kant wrote about this, that there are things in this world that have a universal quality and there are things that are not 'good' which we simply like...I think there are clearly cultural, colonial, gendered, and classist issues with this for a kick-off.

It's nothing to do with production scale or narrative scope because we could all dissect big budget and complex things that are shite, and relatively straightforward low-budget works that are good.

Nor is it to do with how in contact with great political and metaphysical questions the work examined is, because texts clearly shift in time and tell us new things as we accrue distance from them.

You're on a loser trying to nail this down, I'm afraid.

Chedney Honks

Quote from: sevendaughters on April 09, 2021, 06:03:14 PM
I don't.

If you start saying it's what it is shot on then are you saying that Film has ended or is about to end because digital is taking over? I think that is hokum.

No that was a joke


Chedney Honks

OK, I will put my bazooka away, my dude.

El Unicornio, mang

Quote from: Goldentony on April 09, 2021, 05:55:57 PM
Police Academy - Film
Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment - Film
Police Academy 3: Back In Training - Movie
Police Academy 4: Citizens On Patrol - MOVIE
Police Academy 5: Assignment Miami Beach - Film
Police Academy 6: City Under Siege - Movie
Police Academy 7: Mission To Moscow - Film

I'm glad you've put 4 in bold/caps. When I was about 12 I watched the tape (actually bought, not taped off the telly) about twice a week. Haven't seen it since then, don't want to tarnish my memory of it being the greatest movie/film ever made.

chveik

monke vs lizar FILM
King Kong vs Godzilla MOVIE

Sebastian Cobb


Goldentony

Quote from: El Unicornio, mang on April 09, 2021, 06:34:38 PM
I'm glad you've put 4 in bold/caps. When I was about 12 I watched the tape (actually bought, not taped off the telly) about twice a week. Haven't seen it since then, don't want to tarnish my memory of it being the greatest movie/film ever made.

it's fucking great mate, honest, dunno how they pulled something like 4 out the bag late in the game but its a winner

El Unicornio, mang

Damn, I might have to revisit it this weekend.

Thomas

Quote from: Blumf on April 09, 2021, 11:08:28 AM
In ye olden days of two years ago, it was pretty simple, proper films came out in the cinemas, and then there was straight-to-video or TV-movies for the rest.

But now, with the dreaded lurgy forcing even big brand films straight onto streaming, that division isn't so clear. So how do you draw the line? Budget? Production company? Marketing?

For several years I've kept an annual list of all the films and TV series/serials I watch. Sometimes, with a prickly insistence on categorising the titles correctly, I run into this problem.

Recently I watched The Naked Civil Servant and wasn't sure where to put it. A feature-length film, yes - but a TV film, produced and broadcast for television. (In the end, I did put it under TV series/serials for this reason - also bearing in mind that its cultural impact was dependent on its accessibility as an ITV showing).

However, this whole time I've been putting the Wallace and Gromit shorts under films, despite their BBC exclusivity.

Are they inherently short films first, that just happen to reach the audience via television in way secondary to their identity? Or are they inherently televisual, rightly belonging under TV series/serials? And yet if I see a short film online, I've no compunction about putting it under films. The mind boggles.

Magnum Valentino

Haha, me too. I just keeping having to redefine the columns I put stuff in. I'm less obsessive about it than I used to be with this sort of thing though. I bought Criterion's Scorsese Shorts disc recently which necessitated changing the first column to Films, Shorts and Documentaries. Watching the BFI's Alan Clarke boxset threw things up the left as well as there were so many film-length teleplays but being made for television, I settled on "television". But now there's a Scum in both lists, due to the particular circumstances of that film.

petercussing

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on April 09, 2021, 02:04:29 PM
Death Wish is the same, a man driven mad by the PTSD of what has gone.

Death Wish III is a cartoon but it's way more fun.

I like to do a nice hot take to impress everyone at how clever i am by contending that the first Death Wish is actually a serial killer movie dressed up like a revenge movie. He at no point take revenge on the actual initial antogonists and he lures several people into attacking him and kills them with the same M.O. each time. He's a serial killer by any definition, even if it's a result of understandable anguish and PTSD.

Plus it is cartoonish, I think, but in a different way, it's a v. dumb movie with ridiculously big and cartoonish characters. I think 3 is just so massively cartoonish that it obscures it from the first 2 somewhat. Pretty much all Michael Winner films are a mix of the cartoonish and grubbiness and i loves it.

Also, and this is a totally unnecessary point to make on a message board designed to engender topics like this and i know it's just a way of expanding a discussion, but having a mental separation for some films being "proper" and some not seems to be a totally unnecessary deliniation to me. What is point? What does it get you? I mean, cool if you do and it helps you enjoy films more, but it seems like a waste of mental energy to my narrow, honky ass.

#49
I think the point is that the people on here enjoy a wide range of viewing material, and that to do so in an engaged and thoughtful way, you need to compartmentalize films/movies a bit, because they're so often trying to do different things. For example, nobody's going to criticize Class of Nuke 'Em High for being less moving than The Bicycle Thieves or less urbanely witty than Dinner with Andre. Making an objective critical judgement would require you to think about whether it was a good trashy comedy horror bit of nonsense or a bad one.


Dr Rock

There's porn films, which aren't real films, and real films, which can have sex in them but not too much.

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: Dr Rock on April 10, 2021, 11:24:27 AM
There's porn films, which aren't real films, and real films, which can have sex in them but not too much.

And in some cases 'proper films' that were made on the sly under the guise of them being softcore smut, like The Last Seduction:
Quote
Screenwriter Steve Barancik said he believed the film was originally pitched as a "standard skin-e-max" low-budget movie to ITC Entertainment even though the filmmakers had "an under-the-radar intention to make a good movie".[2] ITC Entertainment executives were upset with a scene in which Linda Fiorentino is dressed as a cheerleader and wears suspenders over her breasts. Barancik recalled, "Apparently, a guy from the company who was monitoring things and watching the dailies, saw the suspenders over Linda's nipples, and shouted out, 'Are we making an art movie?!' He shut down production and called the principals of the movie on the carpet and they all had to pledge that they had no artistic pretensions".[2] The scene was cut and the sexual roleplaying theme was lost

Quote from: Dr Rock on April 10, 2021, 11:24:27 AM
There's porn films, which aren't real films, and real films, which can have sex in them but not too much.
Yeah, porn films are definitely something different and not "proper". Ephemeral. Something similarly marginal would be corporate/promotional films, and things like safety/training/instruction films, all of of which are going to made using film-making skills but are never going to be considered as films, or movies.

popcorn

Quote from: St_Eddie on April 09, 2021, 12:40:42 PM
Exactly!  I'm glad someone here gets it.  Still annoys me to this day the state of that previous thread and the precious little bruised egos getting all offended by myself, for making a perfectly reasonable distinction between two different forms of cinema.

Are you completely sure it was the other egos that were bruised there mate.

chveik

bunch of cinephiles DESTROYED by the implacable logic of the film/movie distinction

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: Astronaut Omens on April 10, 2021, 12:26:21 PM
Yeah, porn films are definitely something different and not "proper". Ephemeral. Something similarly marginal would be corporate/promotional films, and things like safety/training/instruction films, all of of which are going to made using film-making skills but are never going to be considered as films, or movies.

Has there been any grot that's been well-written and well-made enough to be elevated and critically appraised on its story?

When the Stormy Daniels stuff was kicking off some reported she'd written and directed a cyberpunk film called The Chatroom which sounded quite interesting and prescient there's a safe-for-work review here:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/ywxpnj/stormy-daniels-trump-affair-porn-star-review

I've not watched it but I'm genuinely quite intrigued by it a non 'dirty old bollocks' kind of way.

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on April 10, 2021, 03:01:44 PM
Has there been any grot that's been well-written and well-made enough to be elevated and critically appraised on its story?

The films of Radley Metzger have their cinephile defenders, more because of their style than their story. And Stephen Sayadian's films 'Night Dreams' and 'Cafe Flesh' stand as pieces of genuine surrealist filmmaking

checkoutgirl

Quote from: Magnum Valentino on April 09, 2021, 11:32:23 AM
Aye, like The Irishman - made for and by Netflix, but released on home video by Criterion!

Eh, I saw the Irishman in the cinema. Confused now.

Sebastian Cobb

Pre-covid they needed a limited cinema run for awards I think. Mubi have done the same.

checkoutgirl

Quote from: St_Eddie on April 09, 2021, 12:40:42 PM
Still annoys me to this day the state of that previous thread and the precious little bruised egos getting all offended by myself, for making a perfectly reasonable distinction between two different forms of cinema.

That's a personality thing, people are getting annoyed with your attitude, style or the way you're presenting your point. The movie/film distinction is as old as the hills and well accepted I'm sure. Jim Jarmusch makes films, Kevin Feige makes movies. Steven Spielberg makes both, sometimes at the same time.