criterionforum.org

Life Itself, the new film from the auteur behind This is Us, is getting numerous comparisons to Collateral Beauty and The Book of Henry after its premiere at Toronto. It contains two separate bloody bus accidents and the line "Life itself is the most unreliable narrator."

The Narrator Returns wrote: Sun Sep 09, 2018 5:30 pm Life Itself, the new film from the auteur behind This is Us, is getting numerous comparisons to Collateral Beauty and The Book of Henry after its premiere at Toronto. It contains two separate bloody bus accidents and the line "Life itself is the most unreliable narrator."

lol

Fogelman's gonna start a shared TV/film universe of quasi-philosophical pseudo-realistic schlock, isn't he.

domino harvey wrote: Mon Sep 10, 2018 7:57 pm Unlike those disasters, this rundown kinda makes me want to see it, though

"Annette Bening is hit by a bus for comedic effect." is the funniest thing I'll read today.

That apparently occurs after Samuel L. Jackson explains in voice-over, while she smokes, that you can't show people smoking in movies anymore, which I'm taking as a 20th Century Women allusion.

I don't think I've seen any of his other work, but the guy wrote Tangled, for which I'll be forever grateful. In a sea of pedestrian movies aimed at young girls, this Disney effort was an absolute surprise and delight to watch on an early Saturday morning with my daughter (and son, who likes it just as much). I actually think I liked it more than both of them!

There really was something special about that piece of shit, Collateral Beauty. As much as I hated that film just hearing this one get compared to it makes me want to see it.

Apparently there's also a scene where Oscar Isaac talks about trying to masturbate to Still Alice, which was included in the script back when Julianne Moore had the Annette Bening role. This sounds like the hottest of messes, will def buy this on Black Friday for $5 sometime to find out

Wow, so "Dan Fogelman" is the guy who made this and This is Us?

Now that I know his name, I can't stop wanting to call him "Dan Fogelberg". I wonder if the songs from the latter would work with the movies/TV series of the former?

I totally had this dude confused with Dan Futterman.

I don't want to live in a world where there's an auteur filmmaker named Dan Fogelman, and from the sounds of this, I won't have to.

domino harvey wrote: Tue Sep 11, 2018 3:25 pm Apparently there's also a scene where Oscar Isaac talks about trying to masturbate to Still Alice

This is exactly the kind of weak dialogue gag that would be written into a 90s Kevin Smith film and I am here for it, baby!

I'm sad to say this is not nearly as fun as The Book of Henry was. The first half is screamingly awful, with probably Oscar Isaac's worst-ever performance, then it actually approaches being good when Antonio Banderas takes it over for five or ten minutes, and then it gets gradually worse until it bottoms out with the ending, where the emotional climax involves the narrator basically reading from the "Reception" part of Time Out of Mind's Wikipedia page.

Perhaps most humorously of all is Fogelman's belief that the bad reviews are coming from cynical men and yet I see at least six pans by women here.

Dan Fogelman wrote:“There’s a disconnect between something that is happening between our primarily white male critics who don’t like anything that has any emotion.”

Amazing.

Gotta say I am so sick of these white male critics and their notorious and longstanding aversion to emotion in cinema.

(What the fuck is he talking about? Is this our world now? If something bombs or doesn't go over well critically, artists can immediately turn around and blame it on whiteness or toxic masculinity or whatever other formerly-meaningful-but-now-meaningless buzzwords are trendy that week... I'm sure this is all heading somewhere really great and we don't risk some horrible cultural backlash at all. Seems fine.)

Big Ben wrote: Fri Sep 21, 2018 6:07 am Perhaps most humorously of all is Fogelman's belief that the bad reviews are coming from cynical men and yet I see at least six pans by women here.

Dan Fogelman wrote:“There’s a disconnect between something that is happening between our primarily white male critics who don’t like anything that has any emotion.”

Amazing.

Well, that's certainly a new twist on #MeToo!

Big Ben wrote: Fri Sep 21, 2018 6:07 am Perhaps most humorously of all is Fogelman's belief that the bad reviews are coming from cynical men and yet I see at least six pans by women here.

Dan Fogelman wrote:“There’s a disconnect between something that is happening between our primarily white male critics who don’t like anything that has any emotion.”

Amazing.

It's like the backlash against the backlash against the film of the musical LES MISERABLES -- some were complaining that nobody in the Age of Irony could take seriously a movie that was so "SINCERE" and I'm puking in my mouth a little as I type that...

It's just another way of cheaply blaming critics. Before, it was "what do they know, they never made a movie anyway". Now it's this. Tomorrow, it'll be something else.
The issue here, to me, is that it might dilute real cases of critics being biased in this kind of way.

A white male trying to paint his film's horrible reception as a victimization at the hands of white male critics.

Is there an academic term for what Fogelman's doing here? Or a slang one?

Persona wrote: Sat Sep 22, 2018 2:06 pm A white male trying to paint his film's horrible reception as a victimization at the hands of white male critics.

Is there an academic term for what Fogelman's doing here? Or a slang one?

Self loathing perhaps?