criterionforum.org

Sigh, another completely accurate biopic--this guy just keeps making the same movie!

Sounds great, but considering Larrain is perhaps our greatest director of women actively making movies, it's a shame to see him depart from that mode. Hopefully he finds a role for Mariana di Girolamo and slyly makes her the heroine

I kind of wondered if he'd ever make a film with Pinochet himself as the central character...wouldn't have predicted this though!

therewillbeblus wrote: Fri Jun 24, 2022 5:04 pm Sounds great, but considering Larrain is perhaps our greatest director of women actively making movies, it's a shame to see him depart from that mode. Hopefully he finds a role for Mariana di Girolamo and slyly makes her the heroine

There will always be a cameo from Margaret Thatcher to speculate about!

DarkImbecile wrote: Fri Jun 24, 2022 4:43 pm Pablo Larrain to direct El Conde, a satire featuring Augusto Pinochet as a 250-year-old vampire

This will appear on Netflix on September 15.

Didn't like this one much. Conceptually interesting, I guess, but is it some unwritten rule that modern satires have to be so blatantly over-written and on-the-nose? If it is, this one doesn't have the entertainment value to pay it off.

Nice cinematography, though.

Yeah I felt similarly - it had enough juicy moments to be sparsely fun, but Larraín has a gift at gradually sobering an audience to facets of life and subjective experience we often obstruct into complexity as a defense, and so every project that isn't designed to delve deeply into a new humanist entry point with ferocious clarity feels like a wasted opportunity. I get that artists like to fool around too though

Persona wrote: is it some unwritten rule that modern satires have to be so blatantly over-written and on-the-nose?

Compared to what?

I’ll chime with agreement that this felt like a bust. The idea is too good not to have made it into a movie, but I don’t think Larrain had any solid ideas beyond that initial one resulting in fairly generic story beats to fill in the empty beats. The narration even makes fun of how generic the story is at one point.

I caught this at a free screening at the Paris Theater. The highlight was having Ed Lachman there discussing his work. It felt like an event capitalizing on his Oscar nomination for the film since they really leaned in on that during the intro alone, and I got the feeling he was both flattered and a bit shy about being the center of attention. At one point he even implied that he didn't know if people really wanted to hear the specifics of his work even though he was more than happy to discuss them, but it was pretty great. Afterwards, I heard him mention to someone that his next film (again with Larrain, this time about Maria Callas with Angelina Jolie in the title role) may be his last feature due to his physical health issues. So I'm glad that I caught it on the big screen because of Lachman's work alone. Unfortunately that's all that I really liked about the film and I never grew to appreciate the concept which felt gimmicky and shallow without ever leading to anything truly insightful.