The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

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DarkImbecile
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The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

#1 Post by DarkImbecile » Mon Mar 27, 2023 11:50 am

therewillbeblus wrote:
Sun Jan 01, 2023 2:22 am
Without a shred of news in 27 months, I'm not holding out hope for The Brutalist any more, at least not with the same cast/crew
This has apparently finally started production, and indeed with at least several different cast members

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domino harvey
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Re: The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

#2 Post by domino harvey » Sat Aug 31, 2024 9:15 pm

This screened today and reactions are very much in the effusive vein of it being a worthy inheritor to the Godfather

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Re: The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

#3 Post by pianocrash » Sun Sep 01, 2024 4:35 am

domino harvey wrote:
Sat Aug 31, 2024 9:15 pm
This screened today and reactions are very much in the effusive vein of it being a worthy inheritor to the Godfather
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The Ghost Of Robert Evans wrote:Image
Prestige filmmaking hype machine in full effect, and it's barely September 1st!

I still have some faith in Corbet, but let's be honest 8-[

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Re: The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

#4 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Sep 01, 2024 6:43 am

I wouldn't be surprised if it's better (now there's some hyperbole for ya), Corbet is the real deal

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Re: The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

#5 Post by therewillbeblus » Tue Sep 24, 2024 1:55 pm

A24 has slated a Dec 20 limited release date

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domino harvey
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Re: The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

#6 Post by domino harvey » Fri Sep 27, 2024 11:13 am

Disappointingly, this is only screening in 35mm at the Chicago Film Festival, which is especially odd since Music Box literally just had a 70mm-themed screening program. Still got a ticket though!

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Re: The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

#7 Post by Never Cursed » Wed Oct 16, 2024 2:37 am

Nearly a week out from seeing this film, I am still haunted by its horrifying final passages -
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an act of violence, a trauma response, an accusation, a chase, filmed in shadow that creeps around Guy Pearce and Adrien Brody until one of them, or both of them, is/are completely enclosed by it and disappear/s.
Maybe my emotional response is naive, as one of the great things about the film is its use of this dreadful third act as a weapon against your own memories of the first 140 or so minutes. The earlier optimism of Brody's character towards his adoptive homeland is itself exposed as credulous, an invitation of harm and an avenue through which feculent reactionary ideology enters his bloodstream. Still, I doubt if any Smile or Terrifier sequel would get so thoroughly lodged in my brain, corrupting my dreams and ruining my sleep, as the dusklight nightmare Corbet initiates in the twisting corridors of Carrara's marble quarry and continues through to an epilogue that tells us how completely human suffering can drown under art interpreted through the lens of a different kind of suffering.

This anecdote probably makes little sense to those who haven't seen The Brutalist and have nothing to compare it with. I can oblige with some examples. While the extreme urgency of Corbet's previous film rears its head in this film's second half and provides useful context, the filmmaker that The Brutalist is at once indebted to and sometimes violently upset with is mid-career Paul Thomas Anderson. (Far more so than Francis Ford Coppola - the Godfather pullquotes are either not-unmerited hosannas or are otherwise inspired by Corbet's very thematically different focus on family). If one wants to think about the film, or about films, in this way, the first two acts are a restaging/refutation of The Master, a pairing of a Jewish Freddie and an ur-Gentile Master that swiftly and intentionally collapses. Brody's Holocaust survivor is too crippled, too uncomfortable, too much of an immigrant to reach beyond himself and his vision to challenge his other half. His fierce interjections in support of his grand artistic vision are not the utopian pleas of a Cesar Catilina so much as the only type of self-defense allowed him by his new environment. (I read once that the generation of settler-colonists that came of age in the newly founded Israeli state had almost as much contempt for Holocaust survivors as they did for Arabs, that they hated these "men of dust" for their pessimistic spirit, of no use in a country full of desert to tame, Bauhaus architecture to erect, and Palestinians to shoot). And Guy Pearce's sophisticate billionaire has even less to offer the world than the prophets of a pseudoscientific religion. He fails to see the importance of Brody's work until instructed by trusted authorities, openly admits his lack of talent and personal value, and spends his time imposing power upon other people in a manner designed to violate our trust through control disguised as largesse. Unusual commoners like Freddie Quell or László Tóth would not be human beings to people like this man were they not imbued with some kind of socially valued talent. Where Anderson sees the difference between his protagonists as an avenue for at least creative destruction, Corbet finds an unbridgeable divide. Post-war America, in his telling, was full of pairings of people that accomplished something in spite of the inability of those people to understand or even like each other, who accomplished something in spite of themselves. And following the metaphor, the aforementioned final act of the film becomes an extension of There Will Be Blood's intense coda with more moving parts. Imagine if the bowling pin hit Daniel-Day Lewis back and you'll have some idea of the expression that Joe Alwyn makes in his final scene of awful, nauseating realization.

But these terms are not the ones that keep me returning to The Brutalist. They aren't even found within the accomplished and beautiful craft of the film, the expressive and shadowy cinematography or the barn-burning performances of the two lead actors. (The replacement of Joel Edgerton and Mark Rylance with Brody and Pearce might charitably be regarded among the greatest recasting upgrades in modern film history; both performers would merit the Oscars they might well win). What disturbs me about the movie is actually its most subliminal yet personally relevant political message in the form of its relationship to
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diasporic and Zionist Judaism. The movie could easily, cynically, and inaccurately be read as an endorsement of Zionist beliefs: a Jew tries and fails to make a home for himself in the world, finds that the world rejects him, and decides to return to the only place where he truly belongs. After all, the sympathetic Raffey Cassidy and her husband (to say nothing of Felicity Jones' character) come to the conclusion first and lead their errant parents back home in the film's closing moments, seizing upon the hidden meanings in Brody's artwork to weave a tale of his eternal belonging to Eretz Yisrael. But Corbet rejects that message completely and with disgust. His film haunts me because it is a note-perfect depiction of how Zionism became a cure-all calming the troubled minds of disaffected 20th century Jews, people like my parents, my extended relatives, and my Hebrew school teachers. All the microaggressions and markers of unbelonging that come with living in America as any kind of minority group, no matter how small or assimilated into the elite, take a toll, especially when paired with the awful memory of the Holocaust. If assimilation offers people like these no spiritual release, they become only too amenable to ethnonationalism, to being assuaged with access to corrosive social power somewhere else. Adrien Brody and his family, victims of sexual violence in both Europe and America whose abusive encounters with Christian societies have left them bitter, jaded, and disabled, represent those particularly vulnerable to this political tactic. If this film can be said to have a political message, it is a cry to resist this temptation more abstract but no less powerful or urgent than the similar plea located in last year's The Zone of Interest. This is also the throughline between The Brutalist and Vox Lux: how is it that the thing that's making us feel alright is also the thing killing us?

Someday, hopefully soon, I will be rid of the urgent feeling undergirding this newer film and its political message. Until then, I will remain too aware of how many people like me were radicalized without thinking of themselves as anything but reasonable, and how the world grew to accept their excesses.
The only way I can end this capsule is by relating the story of the real László Tóth, who I suppose is the inspiration for the name of Adrien Brody's character. The real Tóth was (is?) a Hungarian geologist who became convinced he was Christ come again and, famously, attacked Michaelangelo's Pietà in 1972. He broke off several pieces of the Virgin Mary from the statue with a hammer before being subdued, an act for which he was deported to Australia. I recount this anecdote because, to my amazement, the statue is made of Carrara marble, precisely the same material
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entombing Brody and Pearce during that horrifying climax.
Last edited by Never Cursed on Wed Oct 16, 2024 10:46 am, edited 2 times in total.

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JamesF
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Re: The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

#8 Post by JamesF » Wed Oct 16, 2024 3:02 am

Might wanna add a spoiler tag onto that last sentence?

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Never Cursed
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Re: The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

#9 Post by Never Cursed » Wed Oct 16, 2024 10:05 am

I did, but don’t worry - I was being metaphorical, not literal, in my use of that verb. You haven’t been spoiled.

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Re: The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

#10 Post by brundlefly » Tue Oct 22, 2024 9:25 am


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Re: The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

#11 Post by tehthomas » Thu Oct 24, 2024 1:39 pm

I'm siked for this. Excellent trailer. Looks grand and ambitious, love to see such a big swing for the fences.

I made the observation with 'The Brutalist' and 'Megalopolis' that it's interesting to see two epics released this year concerning 'builders' and then, after watching 'The Apprentice' there is actually a third (albeit more loosely in terms of describing Trump as a builder).

While the timeline doesn't align with Nolan influencing these three, it seems this recent trend of making sweeping films about "builders" started with 'Oppenheimer'.

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Re: The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

#12 Post by yoloswegmaster » Thu Dec 12, 2024 5:47 pm

Never Cursed wrote:
Thu Dec 12, 2024 4:10 pm
yoloswegmaster wrote:
Thu Dec 12, 2024 3:40 pm
The even more insane piece of news is that there are rumours that The Brutalist hasn't received an official rating from the MPAA because they want to give it a NC-17 rating (that might actually not be that more insane).
All I can say is anyone interested in this film should probably steer clear of discussions of this in detail, because the reasons why this might be a problem for the film (and there are some, though I don't know if content-wise this is any worse than Poor Things, which was fine last year BBFC quibble notwithstanding) are strong spoilers
I'm a bit surprised that this is something that is having trouble getting an "R" rating from the MPAA. Is this really something that is more graphic than something like Anora?

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Re: The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

#13 Post by beamish14 » Thu Dec 12, 2024 6:15 pm

yoloswegmaster wrote:
Thu Dec 12, 2024 5:47 pm
Never Cursed wrote:
Thu Dec 12, 2024 4:10 pm
yoloswegmaster wrote:
Thu Dec 12, 2024 3:40 pm
The even more insane piece of news is that there are rumours that The Brutalist hasn't received an official rating from the MPAA because they want to give it a NC-17 rating (that might actually not be that more insane).
All I can say is anyone interested in this film should probably steer clear of discussions of this in detail, because the reasons why this might be a problem for the film (and there are some, though I don't know if content-wise this is any worse than Poor Things, which was fine last year BBFC quibble notwithstanding) are strong spoilers
I'm a bit surprised that this is something that is having trouble getting an "R" rating from the MPAA. Is this really something that is more graphic than something like Anora?

Terrifier 3 had a box office take that was about 30x its production budget, and its distributor did not even bother to submit it to the MPAA. I really hope we’re seeing a trend of studios eschewing it completely.

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Re: The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

#14 Post by knives » Thu Dec 12, 2024 6:20 pm

They can be a bit random. That Monroe movie got it for some cgi.

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Re: The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

#15 Post by beamish14 » Thu Dec 12, 2024 6:27 pm

knives wrote:
Thu Dec 12, 2024 6:20 pm
They can be a bit random. That Monroe movie got it for some cgi.
They’ve always been relatively more lax about violence than sexuality, but I was really amazed by Longlegs not earning an NC-17

It’s astounding that films like David O. Russell’s Spanking the Monkey got it, but THAT didn’t

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Re: The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

#16 Post by yoloswegmaster » Tue Dec 17, 2024 2:52 pm

beamish14 wrote:
Thu Dec 12, 2024 6:15 pm
Terrifier 3 had a box office take that was about 30x its production budget, and its distributor did not even bother to submit it to the MPAA. I really hope we’re seeing a trend of studios eschewing it completely.
It looks like this will be released unrated, since it's opening in a week and a rating still hasn't been given. I'm just excited to be catching this on 70mm on Christmas, though I am a bit peeved at myself for not getting the tickets to yesterday's screening with a Q&A with Brady Corbet.

EDIT: Nevermind, it just got an R rating

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Re: The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

#17 Post by Giovanni Nosferatu » Thu Dec 19, 2024 5:38 am

An absolute masterpiece - a film I haven't stopped thinking about since I saw it a few weeks ago. Corbet establishes himself as someone who is going to redefine American cinema in his own way, and it somehow feels both classical and innovative, something that I have only seen a few times before.

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Re: The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

#18 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Jan 12, 2025 1:54 am

There was so much more laughter at my second screening, which is key for such a serious film - not only in lightening the tough load we're asked to bear, but because a lot of the funniest line deliveries come from Pearce
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whose veneer of "innocent" naivete in the first half turns into something much more disturbing in the second, even though we knew we were laughing at the expense of someone sinister to make ourselves feel better all along..
The use of humor as a defense mechanism for Brody and from Pearce is self-reflexive in a way I didn't pick up the first time. See this in a theatre, ideally a packed one in 70mm.

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Re: The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

#19 Post by bearcuborg » Wed Jan 15, 2025 3:43 pm

I was not prepared for what I saw last night. Prior to the movie starting, I was only there for the 70mm VistaVision projection at the AMC 13 in New York. At some point in the first half of part 1 I realized I was seeing something special, but by the time of the intermission break, I thought I might be experiencing one of the best movies ever made. It's the movie Oppenheimer, Megalopolis, and There Will Be Blood wanted to be...if they had a thought in their head.

This film is a colossal achievement on every level. It looks, and sounds stunning. I had not read a single review, as all I knew was process in which it was made and the subject of brutalism architecture. There's a moment with a train, and smoke stack that caused tears to pour down my face...a reaction to the implication of the shot (and that glorious fire), and the beauty with which it was executed. In most period films I can't see past the artifact of the process of filmmaking - here it's seamless. This movie feels 50 years old. Seeing it on anything apart from projected on film in 70mm would not being seeing it as intended.

Daniel Blumberg has been a favorite of mine since I discovered Yuck in 2011. I lost touch with him over the years, but the soundtrack to this film is extraordinary. The end credits dedicate the film to Scott Walker, and its easy to hear why if anyone is familiar with something like Tilt - a dark, and forlorn album that is most rewarding when sitting with it... Like the movie itself, The Brutalist soundtrack is beautiful and modern, but also harsh and horrifying. The period songs are also used exceedingly well with the final piece of music being incredibly jarring - leaving me somewhat perplexed and angry...

All the performances are first rate, with Guy Pierce and Felicity Jones being standouts. Isaach de Bankolé, Alessandro Nivola and Jonathan Hyde also make incredible use of their limited screen time. Having just watched Adrian Brody being interviewed on CBS Sunday morning, he seems to be a man with boundless passion for creating. Brady Corbet could not have cast anyone else but Brody in this role. This film couldn't have been made without him, and he now stands tall among the greatest actors of his generation.

Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold were complete unknowns to me, but the film is rife with references to literature, classical art, film history, and jewish identity. It's staggering what they have created and made. They offer no answers in this allegory of the Jewish experience of surviving WWII, no conclusive definition of zionism. No comfort is given in the America presented here with the never ending battle between artist, and capitalist. Some will say the 2nd half is a downer, compared to the optimism of the first half - but the anti-semitism in the first half was not lost on me (half jewish on my father's side - something that figures into this movie). Watch the way bodies positioned on screen create lines that remind one of nazi symbols, candles go from being arranged as menorahs to eventually being a devils tail at the near climax. It's uncomfortable and shocking. The movie is also kinky as fuck! I saw at least one walkout...

30 yrs ago this movie would be a sensation, a controversial shit show outside the theaters. Today, it flies under the radar - given that theaters are mostly filled with CGI super hero and wannabe horror movies. The pretension in this film is rewarding to any intellectual looking for a movie of this kind. It's really a miracle it exists at all. This is the best film I've seen since INLAND EMPIRE. Corbet and Fastvold have arrived, they are now among greats.

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Re: The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

#20 Post by Fiery Angel » Thu Jan 16, 2025 1:31 pm

I rarely agree with Richard Brody, but he hits the nail on the head here. How Guy Pearce was able to say some of his dialogue without breaking into laughter is pretty impressive.

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Re: The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

#21 Post by hearthesilence » Thu Jan 16, 2025 11:11 pm

I think the film has more merit than Brody would suggest, but I don't think he's wrong either. It's a great production, the cast is wonderful, but unfortunately it left me feeling a bit empty. I actually did not like the last act, and I agree with Brody's frustration about the epilogue and the unfulfilled potential it suggests.

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Re: The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

#22 Post by Red Screamer » Fri Jan 17, 2025 1:47 pm

Yeah, sorry to be a grinch, but if this is some sort of grand feat it must be one of production rather than of filmmaking—which makes sense since, like Oppenheimer, it’s a portrait of the artist as a project manager. Visually, it’s competent but not especially expressive or inventive, and the writing feels more like an outline for a movie, filled in with a kitchen sink of types. The only performance that brings something surprising to the table is Guy Pearce, whose genuine buffoonery shades into genuine malice without suggesting a break in character. Corbet entertains and handles the long running time well, which is not nothing, but the narrative is all lopsided and, despite the duration, offers references to, rather than experiences of, many of its major beats and developments. Smashing together a bunch of iconic elements from classic sources is hardly the way to make a new classic and leads, for this viewer at least, to a lethal predictability. I quite like Never Cursed’s reading, though, and I wish I’d seen the same things, or that the movie had colored outside the lines more to make such points more effectively. But I don’t think Corbet has that much of a handle on his irony given, for example, the film’s inconsistent campiness, recourse to puzzlingly on-the-nose newsreel footage (to unnecessarily explain the post-war economic boom & drug addiction), and employment of a cringeworthy character like Isaach de Bankolé’s Gordon, who exists only as an easy signpost of our protagonist's fluctuating levels of generosity.

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Re: The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

#23 Post by Never Cursed » Fri Jan 17, 2025 4:42 pm

Red Screamer wrote:
Fri Jan 17, 2025 1:47 pm
I quite like Never Cursed’s reading, though, and I wish I’d seen the same things, or that the movie had colored outside the lines more to make such points more effectively.
Well to dampen the power of my own argument a little, I was absolutely hit harder than most by the second half of this film for idiosyncratic reasons. To obtain foreign citizenship and a passport, I had shortly before seeing the film been given cause to look through some family-historical documents. They revealed to me how some of my immediate ancestors had experienced traumas that other members of my family had conspired to keep hidden, specifically how
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my grandfather was the target of repeated rape and sexual abuse by a Nazi officer in a concentration camp, received compensation from a foreign government because of this, and had developed Zionist tendencies as a consequence of his experiences (though neither he nor anyone in my immediate family ever moved to Israel, thankfully). In a similar vein, my grandmother (his wife) had severe problems with addiction.
So all of that is to say that the final hour or so of this film had every hair on my body standing on end. therewillbeblus can certainly testify that I left the theater in a daze.

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Re: The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

#24 Post by Never Cursed » Sat Jan 18, 2025 6:27 pm

Interview with the film's editor on the production process - a lot of the information he provides is very interesting, and I did not know (but should have guessed by his surname!) that he is the son of Miklós Jancsó! On a more sour note, it is a shame to hear that generative AI was used for (background) images in the film, however briefly.

EDIT: Incredibly enough, this claim is itself the product of that website's heavy use of generative AI, which rewrote and overstated a detail in another article that said that Midjourney was used to basically generate a concept sketch that was subsequently redrawn by an actual artist. Still not good, but there at least there was no AI art in the actual film.

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Re: The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

#25 Post by mfunk9786 » Sun Jan 19, 2025 1:27 pm

Don’t see much difference between what Fincher has done for decades (among many other filmmakers utilizing CGI for cleanup, etc) and what was done here, except for the fearmongering use of the term ‘AI’

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