"I’m glad I waited until the circus atmosphere around that (record-setting) opening died down before I watched it. Not that I can’t block out stuff like that, but it’s always an annoyance..."
I'm so old, none of the buzz that could skew my enjoyment of the movie stuck to my deteriorating consciousness.
Too, believe or not, I didn't need to watch it for educational purposes but for enjoyment, entertainment, nothing more. And I was entertained. OTOH, I have a huge soft spot in my head for J-Law. And Rylance's performance as in the difference between actor and performance was breath taking IMO, and Chalamet's was surprisingly good. Of course, as a pup from the streets of Manhattan maybe it was his least acting performance. As for Streep and comedy: She was wonderful in "Taming of the Shrew" at NYC's Delacorte forty-plus years ago. Even did a pratfall as I recollect.
Thanks for this Roy, it’s very timely for me since I have also put off watching this, but had already planned to do so this weekend. I loved The Big Short, so I thought that was a positive harbinger for my liking this movie.
It doesn’t surprise me that Mark Rylance is the stand-out, since he’s one of the two or three best actors working today. I’m looking forward to it, and maybe satire (even the dystopian kind) will get the taste of the movie I just watched, Nightmare Alley, out of my mouth. I don’t think that movie was bad, but to say it was *dark* is an understatement, and I’m still shook.
Interesting take. Gotta disagree with you about Streep's ability to play comedy though, I thought she was pretty funny in "Death Becomes Her," but I guess that is more just personal preferences than anything else.
I know everybody involved with making the movie said it was about Climate Change, but I really saw it as more generic, about the total inability of our system/society to deal with much of anything major. Well, works of art can transcend the intentions of their creators I guess.
I'm in Ohio so I'll leave you to go read "To Build a Fire" and "Snow-Bound" now.
My reaction was “Nobody comes off well, just like real life.” I mean, humans aren’t just evil, we’re inherently ridiculous. So everything is open to satire, including things we admire and cherish. “Oh, god, they’re skewering all those concerts for liberal causes!” So many critics (not Roy) hated the parts of “Don’t Look Up” that turned the mirror toward themselves.
"-everyone has a reason for not doing the obviously needed thing -" *
There's an epitaph if I saw one - Maybe the Vogons can chisel that on the moon as some kind of celestial tombstone...
The original Godzilla is a fine, thoughtful film. It's a shame Honda got stuck in a Saturday matinee Kaiju ghetto. Probably paid well. His "Attack of the Mushroom People" is a twisted paranoid masterpiece.
I've decided to swear off any kind of current media. I plan on subscribing to the Criterion Channel and watching exclusively black and white films with subtitles, at least until after the 2024 elections.
* Roy's quote reminds me of a very famous line from that greatest of all Black and White films (with subtitles) Renoir's magnificent "The Rules of the Game" Octave, played by the director, functions a one man Greek Chorus for the energetic, sad and foolish goings on - halfway through the film he sums up everything that has gone on before as well a the entire human condition-
- Octave : The awful thing about life is this: Everybody has their reasons
The inevitability of our impeding doom brings to mind the extinction of the dinosaurs. It wasn't that the imapct itself killed an entire layer of the ecosystem: life did continue on Earth. But the dinosaurs had become so large & so specialized that they could not adapt fast enough.
Human life, at least the forms developed in Western technological capitalism, is not going to make it. It's too late. We're done. Not that all humans will perish. Societies less augmented by technology, who do more of their own labor, who are used to finding food & water in subsistence conditions — & most of all more inclined to communal living — have a better chance, but even that's not a given.
There was this cool picture book of speculative zoology called "After Man," which presented Audubon-style paintings of examples new fauna evolved out of the end of Anthropocene. Most of them were descended from rodents. Life itself has a chance.
Good review, Roy. The film is about as subtle as a hammer murder, but I was still entertained. And although a few critics were irritated by it, I agree with you that Rylance's performance was especially good.
Thanks for the great review. "Don't Look Up" sounded like a too-long SNL routine with a lot of guest stars so I put off seeing it. Now I'll give it a shot just for the distraction. "The Big Short" was an ingenious way to turn the Michael Lewis book (which was terrific) into any kind of film, but in some ways it made just another entertainment out of something that in a more enlightened country would lead to revolution -- which seems like one of the things "Don't Look Up" is attempting to satirize.
"Rylance is the one actor here in real Strangelove territory." This is another reason I've put off seeing "Don't Look Up." Besides everything else it had going for it, Strangelove had a truly miraculous cast. Can you imagine it without Sellers, Scott, or Hayden? Even Slim Pickens was a magnificent accident.
Thank you for this clear eyed review after the noise died down around it. I was so annoyed with McKay and Sirota I couldn’t see it clearly. Astute points as always, especially about having to give too many celebrities moments + a great parsing of the different kinds of satire
Any Nathan Rabin reference is appreciated. I'm avoiding this film until later, partly from annoyance they cast a woman as what seems like a Trump-y president. Is it a commentary on Hillary Clinton's neoliberal shillism (if so, old hat)? Whatever it may be, I got "both sides" vibes from the trailer and am not here for it...yet. Maybe one day.
In the meantime, if anyone hasn't seen Dan Olson's fantastic "Line Goes Up" video on YouTube, about the 2008 financial crisis and the very recent resurrection of it as farce in the form of NFTs, it's a 2-hr banger. I think it may touch on some of the same themes as "Don't Look Up," but retitled as "We're All Going to Make It"!
Thanks for the review, Roy. I’m probably not going to see it—I don’t watch many movies, for whatever reason—but I appreciated the thoughtful analysis of it. It was particularly helpful to me, given that previously there was only hype, or throat-clearing Critical Reviews, or brittle, pinched, More Dem Than Thou types who reflexively hated it because of David Sirota’s presence. (The same kind of person who sniffs that David Dayen couldn’t possibly know anything, or won’t read anyone who’s ever been published in The Intercept. You know, kind of a “clap louder!” Zhdanovism.)
But I digress. Thank you for the review. And I really appreciated the insightful comparison of Dr Strangelove vs Candide.
Haven't seen it, but Climate change as a giant comet seemed to me like a bad analogy, and bad in a way that would just aggravate all our worst tendencies.
With climate change, there are about a million things you and I can do about it - and I don't mean "change your light bulbs and buy a Tesla", I mean build a popular social movement that could transform our world in a thousand positive ways - and the doing of that is already happening, and needs some encouragement, dammit.
But a planet-killing comet? That's NASA's job, and there's no role for the public except as supplicants, begging those in power to do the right thing. It's an analogy that makes us feel powerless, and feeling powerless is the last thing we need to do right now.
All this feeds into my worst fears about climate change, that we'll switch - in an instant - from "Nah, that's not happening" to "Sure it's happening, but too late to do anything about it now!" without ever passing through even a moment where we acknowledge that a) It's real and b) We still have time to do something to make our future less horrible.
I've avoided this. I'm gut-panicked, too. But it's not panic that's kept me away. It's the Star Studded nature of the thing that turns me off. Maybe I'm gut-panicked and grumpy, too.
I just want to put a word in for When Worlds Collide, a 50's movie on the same theme. Back in the day, destroying the planet-killer wasn't an option, so the only thing to do was to build a space ship and spirit a tiny portion of humanity to safety. The thing that hits you full in the face if you watch it today is when the camera pulls back to reveal the passengers of this midcentury-modern Noah's Ark and IT'S ALL WHITE PEOPLE (to be fair, they were chosen randomly from a larger pool of White people.)
Thanks for this review! It's fun to think this movie over, because it does have contradictions and head-scratchers, but still succeeds famously. In any movie with big stars you have to work to believe in their characters, but I think DiCaprio was great in that role, even if I thought he was great because he was DiCaprio nailing a very different kind of role. Jonah Hill was fabulously repulsive. Mark Rylance was stupendous. I can see your objection to Streep, though I didn't feel that way. Her nude scene at the end was one of the best in the movie. I was delighted to find out that the body double for Streep's naked butt is a friend from Worcester, Mass. I really didn't think that was Streep's actual rear end.
"I’m glad I waited until the circus atmosphere around that (record-setting) opening died down before I watched it. Not that I can’t block out stuff like that, but it’s always an annoyance..."
I'm so old, none of the buzz that could skew my enjoyment of the movie stuck to my deteriorating consciousness.
Too, believe or not, I didn't need to watch it for educational purposes but for enjoyment, entertainment, nothing more. And I was entertained. OTOH, I have a huge soft spot in my head for J-Law. And Rylance's performance as in the difference between actor and performance was breath taking IMO, and Chalamet's was surprisingly good. Of course, as a pup from the streets of Manhattan maybe it was his least acting performance. As for Streep and comedy: She was wonderful in "Taming of the Shrew" at NYC's Delacorte forty-plus years ago. Even did a pratfall as I recollect.
But I'm unclear; did Roy enjoy it?
Thanks for this Roy, it’s very timely for me since I have also put off watching this, but had already planned to do so this weekend. I loved The Big Short, so I thought that was a positive harbinger for my liking this movie.
It doesn’t surprise me that Mark Rylance is the stand-out, since he’s one of the two or three best actors working today. I’m looking forward to it, and maybe satire (even the dystopian kind) will get the taste of the movie I just watched, Nightmare Alley, out of my mouth. I don’t think that movie was bad, but to say it was *dark* is an understatement, and I’m still shook.
Interesting take. Gotta disagree with you about Streep's ability to play comedy though, I thought she was pretty funny in "Death Becomes Her," but I guess that is more just personal preferences than anything else.
I know everybody involved with making the movie said it was about Climate Change, but I really saw it as more generic, about the total inability of our system/society to deal with much of anything major. Well, works of art can transcend the intentions of their creators I guess.
I'm in Ohio so I'll leave you to go read "To Build a Fire" and "Snow-Bound" now.
My reaction was “Nobody comes off well, just like real life.” I mean, humans aren’t just evil, we’re inherently ridiculous. So everything is open to satire, including things we admire and cherish. “Oh, god, they’re skewering all those concerts for liberal causes!” So many critics (not Roy) hated the parts of “Don’t Look Up” that turned the mirror toward themselves.
"-everyone has a reason for not doing the obviously needed thing -" *
There's an epitaph if I saw one - Maybe the Vogons can chisel that on the moon as some kind of celestial tombstone...
The original Godzilla is a fine, thoughtful film. It's a shame Honda got stuck in a Saturday matinee Kaiju ghetto. Probably paid well. His "Attack of the Mushroom People" is a twisted paranoid masterpiece.
I've decided to swear off any kind of current media. I plan on subscribing to the Criterion Channel and watching exclusively black and white films with subtitles, at least until after the 2024 elections.
* Roy's quote reminds me of a very famous line from that greatest of all Black and White films (with subtitles) Renoir's magnificent "The Rules of the Game" Octave, played by the director, functions a one man Greek Chorus for the energetic, sad and foolish goings on - halfway through the film he sums up everything that has gone on before as well a the entire human condition-
- Octave : The awful thing about life is this: Everybody has their reasons
Here I was pining for Roy's acid take on MilkweedGate, the south Texas fever dream o'the week...
The inevitability of our impeding doom brings to mind the extinction of the dinosaurs. It wasn't that the imapct itself killed an entire layer of the ecosystem: life did continue on Earth. But the dinosaurs had become so large & so specialized that they could not adapt fast enough.
Human life, at least the forms developed in Western technological capitalism, is not going to make it. It's too late. We're done. Not that all humans will perish. Societies less augmented by technology, who do more of their own labor, who are used to finding food & water in subsistence conditions — & most of all more inclined to communal living — have a better chance, but even that's not a given.
There was this cool picture book of speculative zoology called "After Man," which presented Audubon-style paintings of examples new fauna evolved out of the end of Anthropocene. Most of them were descended from rodents. Life itself has a chance.
No guinea pigs, alas.
Good review, Roy. The film is about as subtle as a hammer murder, but I was still entertained. And although a few critics were irritated by it, I agree with you that Rylance's performance was especially good.
Thanks for the great review. "Don't Look Up" sounded like a too-long SNL routine with a lot of guest stars so I put off seeing it. Now I'll give it a shot just for the distraction. "The Big Short" was an ingenious way to turn the Michael Lewis book (which was terrific) into any kind of film, but in some ways it made just another entertainment out of something that in a more enlightened country would lead to revolution -- which seems like one of the things "Don't Look Up" is attempting to satirize.
"Rylance is the one actor here in real Strangelove territory." This is another reason I've put off seeing "Don't Look Up." Besides everything else it had going for it, Strangelove had a truly miraculous cast. Can you imagine it without Sellers, Scott, or Hayden? Even Slim Pickens was a magnificent accident.
Thank you for this clear eyed review after the noise died down around it. I was so annoyed with McKay and Sirota I couldn’t see it clearly. Astute points as always, especially about having to give too many celebrities moments + a great parsing of the different kinds of satire
Any Nathan Rabin reference is appreciated. I'm avoiding this film until later, partly from annoyance they cast a woman as what seems like a Trump-y president. Is it a commentary on Hillary Clinton's neoliberal shillism (if so, old hat)? Whatever it may be, I got "both sides" vibes from the trailer and am not here for it...yet. Maybe one day.
In the meantime, if anyone hasn't seen Dan Olson's fantastic "Line Goes Up" video on YouTube, about the 2008 financial crisis and the very recent resurrection of it as farce in the form of NFTs, it's a 2-hr banger. I think it may touch on some of the same themes as "Don't Look Up," but retitled as "We're All Going to Make It"!
Thanks for the review, Roy. I’m probably not going to see it—I don’t watch many movies, for whatever reason—but I appreciated the thoughtful analysis of it. It was particularly helpful to me, given that previously there was only hype, or throat-clearing Critical Reviews, or brittle, pinched, More Dem Than Thou types who reflexively hated it because of David Sirota’s presence. (The same kind of person who sniffs that David Dayen couldn’t possibly know anything, or won’t read anyone who’s ever been published in The Intercept. You know, kind of a “clap louder!” Zhdanovism.)
But I digress. Thank you for the review. And I really appreciated the insightful comparison of Dr Strangelove vs Candide.
Haven't seen it, but Climate change as a giant comet seemed to me like a bad analogy, and bad in a way that would just aggravate all our worst tendencies.
With climate change, there are about a million things you and I can do about it - and I don't mean "change your light bulbs and buy a Tesla", I mean build a popular social movement that could transform our world in a thousand positive ways - and the doing of that is already happening, and needs some encouragement, dammit.
But a planet-killing comet? That's NASA's job, and there's no role for the public except as supplicants, begging those in power to do the right thing. It's an analogy that makes us feel powerless, and feeling powerless is the last thing we need to do right now.
All this feeds into my worst fears about climate change, that we'll switch - in an instant - from "Nah, that's not happening" to "Sure it's happening, but too late to do anything about it now!" without ever passing through even a moment where we acknowledge that a) It's real and b) We still have time to do something to make our future less horrible.
I've avoided this. I'm gut-panicked, too. But it's not panic that's kept me away. It's the Star Studded nature of the thing that turns me off. Maybe I'm gut-panicked and grumpy, too.
I just want to put a word in for When Worlds Collide, a 50's movie on the same theme. Back in the day, destroying the planet-killer wasn't an option, so the only thing to do was to build a space ship and spirit a tiny portion of humanity to safety. The thing that hits you full in the face if you watch it today is when the camera pulls back to reveal the passengers of this midcentury-modern Noah's Ark and IT'S ALL WHITE PEOPLE (to be fair, they were chosen randomly from a larger pool of White people.)
Thanks for this review! It's fun to think this movie over, because it does have contradictions and head-scratchers, but still succeeds famously. In any movie with big stars you have to work to believe in their characters, but I think DiCaprio was great in that role, even if I thought he was great because he was DiCaprio nailing a very different kind of role. Jonah Hill was fabulously repulsive. Mark Rylance was stupendous. I can see your objection to Streep, though I didn't feel that way. Her nude scene at the end was one of the best in the movie. I was delighted to find out that the body double for Streep's naked butt is a friend from Worcester, Mass. I really didn't think that was Streep's actual rear end.