The Holdovers (new Alexander Payne)

[Ant Farm Keyboard]

Alexander Payne has actually acknowledged that he took inspiration from the editing style in The Last Detail.

[Mister Six]

I really enjoyed this, helped the cinema was packed and the people around me seemed to find it funny too.

Spoiler alert

The bit where Giamatti tells the guy in the cinema to fuck off had me in bits, it's up there with Gleason in trading places.

[close]

My favourite was the gleeful "CURL YOUR TOES!"

[Mobbd]

I absolutely loved this. 10/10. Can barely stretch my imagination to find fault with it. It came highly recommended too, so it's ridiculously unlikely that I enjoyed it so much.

Noodle's OP review is excellent and touches on some of the thoughts I had, the comparison to The Shining perhaps especially. He even chases the kid, bellowing his name down abandoned corridors!

I liked the vintage touches. It didn't feel try-hard or like a pastiche (as with, say, Stranger Things). A real lightness of touch.

It felt like a proper film. Like something I hadn't seen in ages. Like watching The Graduate or something. I mentioned this to a friend and he said "mid budget," which I hadn't thought of before but there's definitely a "missing middle" in film production at the moment, to pilfer a term from architecture.

Many favourite moments but the one that stands out the most right now is

Spoiler alert

when they're in the cinema. "This is most amusing but also quite an accurate depiction of Sioux society." / "Shhh!" / "Ah, fuck off!"

(I'm glad the moment following the above didn't go too dark or derail the double act. I was very glad when Giamatti caught him before the cab has chance to leave. "You conniving little shit!")

[close]

One last comment: I don't see it as a Christmas film. It takes place at Christmas and it involves Christmas scenarios but it's not about Christmas or anything. Then again, neither is Die Hard or Home Alone II I suppose. Meh. Make of that what you will.

[El Unicornio, mang]

Watched this last night, and while I didn't dislike it, I also didn't find it as charming and wonderful as the critical acclaim would suggest. Thought it was quite a cold film in a way — as if someone had typed in "indie bittersweet coming of age comedy drama directed by Alexander Payne" into ChatGPT, in the sense that it felt very rigidly structured, secrets and emotional moments delivered on cue whether or not the timing was organic to the story overall and ultimately it all just felt a bit surface-level. I think if this had been made 15 years ago, before the majority of popular films became multiverses, sequels and soft reboots, it would have been received much less generously.

A review described it as both underwritten and overwritten, and I agree with that. Characters are constantly telling us how they feel about each other, while the story rockets through a checklist of moments that need to happen in a film like this to get to the end of a film like this (grumpy teacher softens, rich kid is humbled, depth of grieving mother's grief is revealed) without ever laying the proper groundwork for any of them.

I kind of agree with this. I did think it was pretty good though and it felt like a classic coming of age film that's been around since the 70s or 80s. Dead Poets Society definitely sprang to mind. Funniest bit for me was when he threw the American football.

Liked the effort to make it look like 16mm, although I guess the issue is that people are used to seeing 16mm that has degraded/has more artefacts so it's not quite there. But then adding more film weave/breath, scratches etc become kind of distracting and feels gimicky so probably best that it was subtle as it was. I'd probably have left out the dust/scratch emulation. The Souvenir was shot on actual 16mm and has none of that because film processing and cleanup is so advanced now it's not really an issue but it still gets the look and feel across.

Also I always feel uncomfortable watching films set at Christmas when it's not December (or at least late November) so that slightly affected my enjoyment.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

This only seems to have late screenings at the local cinema, so I ended up seeing it Billy No-mates last night. Excellent it was too, although I wish I could have gone with some friends/a more enthusiastic audience. The film deserved some outright guffaws, but this lot never rose above a polite titter. Giamatti's reaction shots alone were hilarious.

I have a few very minor gripes: Having the other students naff off felt like like an odd bait-and-switch/waste of potential. Great as he was, Dominic Sessa looked way too old for his role. Aside from the occasional use of the zoom lens, I didn't feel like the '70s pastiche was really convincing enough to be anything other than a distraction. Also distracting was the constant wondering about how they made Giamatti's eye look like that (as I said, these are very minor gripes).

Overall though, it's top stuff.

[dead-ced-dead]

Dominic Sessa really was very good. I'm often quite skeptical when a first timer ends up leading/co-leading a big Oscar laden movie and they get praised to heaven and back. It often seems to be an overreaction to a good performance in a great movie.

An example, I like Hailee Steinfeld in True Grit, but I think some of her praise is overstated. It's not the second coming as it was praised in 2010.

Sessa I found very believable, though. Perhaps he did look older than he was meant, as Claude says, but he was far closer to Sharlto Copley in District 9 level of authentic than the overpraise some newcomers get.

[sevendaughters]

Sessa was good and he has been praised modestly compared to Giamatti and Randolph. I thought his age worked for him, awkwardly cast in this child world, but not quite an adult in temperament.

[convulsivespace]

Wasn't the character like 17 years old? Looked spot on to me. The actor was only a couple years older in real life.

[BritishHobo]

Simon Stephenson, writer on Paddington 2, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain and Pixar's Luca, has alleged that The Holdovers is plagiarised 'line-by-line' from a script of his that was sent to Alexander Payne twice, first in 2013 - claiming the script was plagiarised in its meaningful entirety:

"By 'meaningful entirety' I do mean literally everything- story, characters, structure, scenes, dialogue, the whole thing. Some of it is just insanely brazen: many of the most important scenes are effectively unaltered and even remain visibly identical in layout on the page."

[Noodle Lizard]

If it was line-by-line then the script really was ripping Payne off in the first place.

That being said, the posh boys boarding school out of If... does feel uniquely quite British. I wasn't really aware there were Etons in the US.

[El Unicornio, mang]

That being said, the posh boys boarding school out of If... does feel uniquely quite British. I wasn't really aware there were Etons in the US.

Less common and more for high school to college age but they do exist, although I remember being surprised at their existence when I first saw Dead Poet's Society