Steve McQueen's highly acclaimed HUNGER

no thread on this. iirc morbs loved it? i thought it was arty in the worst sense and got no idea why this attracted so much love.

I really wanted to see this because the subject matter is interesting, it gained a lot of critical praise and because I like Michael Fassbender, but from an interview or two I've read with Steve McQueen he comes across as a bit of a dick/tard.

The fact that the movie is directed by Steve McQueen always confuses me. I've not seen it though.

I'm kinda suspicious of this flick due to the amount of reviews and interviews that went out their way to say it wasn't political, which seems pointless. I don't have any other view than that cuz I haven't seen and won't ever see it.

I dunno, Steve McQueen's background etc. doesn't really suggest to me he's a big 'RA man.

i thought i would hate it but i ended up thinking it was great

IRELAND FOR THE IRISH

i hated it and left shortly after the long shot of the guy sweeping the piss down the corridor, around the time that he started the hunger strike and mcqueen started his extremely dubious act of turning sands into some sort of martyr (i mean even more than he already had). frankly i thought it pretty repulsive as well as, as nrq said "arty in the worst sense".

For better or worse Sands was some sort of martyr.

I'm kinda suspicious of this flick due to the amount of reviews and interviews that went out their way to say it wasn't political, which seems pointless. I don't have any other view than that cuz I haven't seen and won't ever see it.

― Bernard's Butler (Raw Patrick), Wednesday, February 25, 2009 12:04 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

it's just kind of evasive, but to say it isn't political -- which yep so many reviewers have -- is nuts. how could it not be? is one question. but in fact it is frequently directly 'political': it has clips of news broadcasts and thatcher's voice. but it doesn't explain some basic stuff like the significance of being designated a political prisoner as against a criminal. it has it both ways.

i hated it and left shortly after the long shot of the guy sweeping the piss down the corridor

yeah that shot was where i was: what is he even trying to attempt? so many of the choices seemed designed just to draw attention to themselves, but not even in a 'holy shit this tracking shot is awesome' way, just in a 'wow, this is a really long shot of not much happening' way.

of course! i should have expressed it differently.

it seemed like an excercise in idealisation of sands' fate. and they way it's so lovingly shot; the isolation of the events within the prison, without the context of the killings etc, really does paint him as a victim rather than as someone who chose his fate.

that was an xpost to noodle vague.

kind of amazed this topped the S&S poll for last year.

I know what you meant really, I guess I was saying that Sands is hardly the first controversial figure to get a glowing biopic.

I haven't seen Hunger yet so I can't judge its merits but I don't think it's impossible to turn historical source material into something ahistorical. From what Mr Bronson says I guess the issue is that McQueen maybe isn't trying to be ahistorical but that some of the critics who want to praise him because of his background in the art world are ignoring the difficult elements of the movie.

i think mcqueen does want to take it out of history so far as he can. he is aiming for a robert bresson style.

im sort of bound to bring up this film, i do quite often, but alan clarke's 'elephant' and 'contact' achieve what he's aiming for in that sense. they give zero context.

this was more like gus van sant's 'elephant', where it's a bit vague like, but also you get 'oh and btw they were gay nazis' or something less than useless. there is also really spurious 'balance': basically unrelated to the main narrative, we see a prison guard eventually getting wacked.

hunger doesn't make sands look like a good guy -- at points it makes him look like an idiot. but it does make him seem slightly christlike.

yes the last point is the one i was trying to make, i suppose. those shots of the prisoners against the shit smeared walls are pointedly lit to look like russian icons. it may well get worse as it goes on but, as i said, i left 2/3rds in.

which, the icon thing, even if you totally disregard the political context or even you were supportive of that kind of depitction of terrorists, even then then it's kind of predictably arty and unsubtle and facile.

when sands is dying there are all these shots of bird flying out of trees, to symbolize his soul leaving the body or whatever. fine from any hollywood hack ever, but mcqueen is meant to be a big deal.

ok so this wasn't a documentary about life in an irish apartment complex

nrq's opinion confirms my love. best film since Munich?

if you totally disregard the political context or even you were supportive of that kind of depitction of terrorists

& not the terrorist who's on all the TV networks right now

bit harsh on regis.

Nice to see Morbs weighing in with the kind of informed critical thinking that's won him plaudits from film fans everywhere.

"alan clark's 'elephant'"

The Points of View the week after this was shown on BBC1 was fucking great!

It was total wtf incomprehension from loads of people. I guess now they would have switched over but then there were only 4 channels so you had to take what you got.

iirc slumdog millionaire hitmaker danny boyle had his first real working experience (as producer) on elephant. it is hard to imagine how something with so little dialogue or plot or character ever got made.

& not the terrorist who's on all the TV networks right now

woah, blowin minds with this one.

munich tries to be about terrorism in a direct and honest way, and i think it's a good film if not a great one. hunger does not engage with the pertinent issues; it sets itself apart as a 'work of art', e.g. aestheticizing dirty protests, and feels it unnecessary to ask questions.

even then it even lacks the courage to follow through. it wants to show the brutality of the prison guards, and scores an easy win by using thatcher's voice. she is a bad person, we all get it.

hard to make this film without a full recap of the 'troubles', but if you're going to talk about a 'united ireland', and then show that the people who oppose the idea are evil, and that the people who support it are sort of like jesus, maybe you have to talk about it some more? either that or make elephant.

iirc slumdog millionaire hitmaker danny boyle had his first real working experience (as producer) on elephant. it is hard to imagine how something with so little dialogue or plot or character ever got made.

The Firm was a big hit, or as big a hit as a TV play can be, so I guess he used goodwill from that.

see nrq, movies talk w/ pictures a lot.

and uh, there's a 20-MINUTE DIALOGUE scene w/ a fixed camera.

yeah, i noticed the fixed camera. it screamed 'here is a really long shot with a fixed camera'. but the drama in that scene was about tactics; it didn't reflect on the big picture.

we get the vague impression that the pira leadership isn't so keen on what sands is up to -- that's what i mean by the film sometimes making him look stupid. as a whole the film is light on psychological detail, to say the least, and you are left wondering: why is this guy prepared to kill himself for a movement that doesn't want him to? to what end?

perhaps art is 'there to ask questions, not to answer them'.

yessssssss

Opens (somewhere) in the US on March 20. I'll be going to see how it plays big after screener viewing.

don't want to be a grumpy whiner, but i thought this one was waaaay overrated. the ending sucked, the whole "he's so thin" thing got hyped way too (The Machinist was a lot better, also that Vietnam movie from hmm Werner Herzog, can't recall the title) (Both Christian Bale?)
anyway, i am losing track of what i wanted to say here, but Hunger was arty schmarty and useless.

i was gonna post 'this guy gets it', but WS culture has ruined that expression.

what did you like last year, nrq?

step brothers
pineapple express
role models
fist foot way
tropic thunder

k, the heavily dialectical stuff

ahhh can i say what i liked too? ;) ;)

..

The Darjeeling Limited
Sztucki (Tricks)
Keane (very late re-release in the Netherlands)
Margot at the Wedding
La Graine et le Mulet

i'd like to see La Graine et le Mulet again.

i thought i could almost smell that movie (fish, food, sea, old towns)

does it have a scene where the ira blow something up while a bodhrán soundtrack accompanies?

if not no credibility.

with happy children/hanky headed housewives providing cheery diversions

that was 'the wind that shakes the barley', with that nice fella with the cheekbones.

plz no one ask nrq if he likes any films for grownups

yes please don't ask, that's the last thing you would do. fwiw he liked films by Assayas & Mungiu, to name two from last year, iirc.

i thought the thread was about Hunger though?

lol u blown my cover there

obvious troll is obvious

ES&D

^^ pretty good synopsis

lol

we have your Prick of the Year Oscar for you btw

how lovely.

presented by the previous year's winner?

i think that's a new category.

in limited US release Friday

assorted pro & con links:

http://www.ifc.com/blogs/thedaily/2009/03/hunger.php

apparently less painful than Knowing

very good save some bits at the end there.

not doing particularly well in America -- lasted one week in Brooklyn -- and I blame you people.

i went and saw it despite this thread and it being kinda panned and tbf i wish id gone to see duplicity instead

could you go box office failure bobby sands?

a dope movie but not sure i would want to see it again

Michael Fassbender is Times Fashion supp coverboy, I assume mostly due to That Other Movie:

http://towleroad.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c730253ef0120a5bb0f44970c-pi

Hoping to see Fish Tank next week, which Fassbender stars in too - it got a glowing review in The Guardian yesterday (not that Peter Bradshaw is any kind of quality guarantee...), but I really liked Red Road by the same director.

http://www.criterion.com/films/477

this is on sundance channel next saturday

after this and Fish Tank, I love Michael Fassbender.

properly brilliant movie. probably couldn't sit through it again though.

THE SPIELBERG LOVING MISERABILIST IS RIGHT! THIS WAS A MOVING AND ENGAGING PIECE OF CINEMA!

apparently mcqueen is doing a fela biopic next: http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1328

I thought this was pretty great.

Fela biopic could be pretty great too!

really fucking distracting for some reason that this guy's name is steve mcqueen

same thing happened with john madden

i.e. i went into a murderous rampage where five innocent buckets of popcorn were murdered

wait so there's a director who is also named steve mcqueen?

hes not a director hes a visionary

he's not an overrated dead movie star!

apparently I've never linked this cogent analysis:

http://academichack.net/reviewsOctober2008.htm#Hunger

We are left with the same questions that Sands and Moran laid before us at halftime. Is this heroic? Are we changed by the vicarious sacrifice represented onscreen? Or is it simply an extended dead end, the frank recognition that absolute empathy is impossible? More to the point, how can Bobby Sands and the Republicans, or anyone else, square the political signification of the hunger strike with what we see, and what Sands undergoes? After all, what Sands undergoes is an irreducibly particular death, the extinguishing of a wholly unique and forever irreplaceable light in the world. For Sands' sacrifice to obtain value as protest, it must function synecdochically. His particular body, and those who starved in his wake, must achieve generality. They must be soldiers, Irishmen, not just singular human beings with grieving Mums and Dads and wives and children. And yet, the necessary power of the sacrifice also requires that that full individual dissolution, with all the will and waste it entails, must somehow be retained. Part and whole, all at once.

morbius that is fucking garbage.

"certainly since Eisenstein and Vertov caught Lenin's eye"

bit misleading, i would have thought. without reaching for a textbook to see if lenin saw eisenstein's theatrical work, he was cold in the ground when E and V were making waves.

Films about the "Troubles" in Ireland are virtually a dime a dozen, territory nearly as well-trod as the Holocaust. Is there anything left to say, and if so, is there a manner in which to say it that doesn't just turn unspeakable suffering into comforting bourgeois narrative at best, or cheap spectacle at worst?

yeah real classy, "no business like shoahbusiness" amirite. ugh. we wouldn't want to be bourgeois of course. but is the suffering of people in northern ireland "unspeakable"? i ask this as someone with a close friend who lost people there. reviewer is just using hackademic verbiage.

the writer doesn't know what synecdoche means.

Rather, McQueen is displaying a world of brute materiality, of the gestures required to furtively move objects or manipulate bodies in agony. But more than this, every fragment represents some larger social whole -- the prisoner, the guard. and more than this, the Republicans, the Loyalists, the Catholic Church, the Crown -- that is everpresent but can never exactly be seen as a totality.

*parp*

the penultimate paragraph is pretty mindboggling -- cards in table, i'm not all that committed to the idea of a united ireland, though the means employed to win it may have something to do with that. given the unlikelihood of it happening, i don't think it was worth killing people over, anyway. this stuff about sands's "revolutionary love" is absolutely disgusting. even if i did believe in a united ireland, there was no "revolutionary love" in the conduct of the IRA in the 1970s.

For Sands' sacrifice to obtain value as protest, it must function synecdochically. His particular body, and those who starved in his wake, must achieve generality. They must be soldiers, Irishmen, not just singular human beings with grieving Mums and Dads and wives and children. And yet, the necessary power of the sacrifice also requires that that full individual dissolution, with all the will and waste it entails, must somehow be retained. Part and whole, all at once.

do we stop at "irishmen"? maybe the IRA was bombing pubs for the whole of humanity. what in the name of fuck do the last sentences mean?

makes the film seem even worse than it is.

can't wait to see this now.

really subtle avoidance of workaday politics includes prominent use of thatcher's voice on the radio. boo! hiss!

the killer bitch's presence is vital.

explain.

Haven't seen the movie, so I can't comment on this particular blurb. But the critic he linked is far from garbage, on the whole. He's, by his own admission, a little over academic, but he's also one of the two or three most interesting net-based critics I know of out there.

im not reading him again after that one.

Your loss.

not really, he's clearly a moral idiot.

the pieces posted here are a mess.

But he understands how aesthetics work better than just about anyone.

Then again, I could be again overestimating ILX film buffs capacity for being anything more than glorified fanboys.

I get smug when someone uses "bourgeois" disparagingly.

Just then?

OK, sorry, that's rude. But your screenname is proven right once again.

You guys are taking this too seriously. history's not disparaging the film, only the critic.

I'm more interested in defending the critic than the film, since I haven't seen the latter.

And plus he's a better critic than anyone on ILX tbh.

alfred, he's disparaging the film too, quite rightly.

Eric, i don't think that's true.

I do, or I wouldn't have typed tbh.

But he understands how aesthetics work better than just about anyone.

― queen frostine (Eric H.), Thursday, December 17, 2009 1:07 PM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah a reg'lar jean mitry.

We observe patches of the (Northern) Irish landscape surrounding the prison, but it's unclear where these pastures lay. They are not "establishing shots."

i think they're surrounding the prison?

Individuals are broken down into fingers, earlobes, bloody wounds on the skull, stiff limbs struggling to move through the cell. Everything is reduced to its barest constituent part, but McQueen's parsimony is worlds away from Bresson, whose work it superficially resembles at first. There is nothing transcendental about Hunger.

not that superficially: the bloody hands in the sink is a borrow from 'l'argen' iirc.

But more than this, every fragment represents some larger social whole -- the prisoner, the guard. and more than this, the Republicans, the Loyalists, the Catholic Church, the Crown -- that is everpresent but can never exactly be seen as a totality.

so he's non-transcendental and materialist except that...

when the guard suddenly becomes a stand-in for his social position, sum and total, it is shocking, because McQueen's radical materialist humanism displays in concrete terms the cold rationality, the madness but also the logic, of a battle in which men must embody forces larger than themselves.

i mean, im just saying this is bs. but i must also admit to not understanding all of this. what does he mean by "when the guard suddenly becomes a stand-in for his social position, sum and total" -- what moment is this? what does this even mean anyway? but anyway, it is shocking because... "because McQueen's radical materialist humanism displays in concrete terms the cold rationality, the madness but also the logic, of a battle in which men must embody forces larger than themselves."

this is indeed because i had expected McQueen's radical materialist humanism to display in altogether less concrete ways the cold rationality, the madness but also the logic, of a battle in which men must embody forces larger than themselves.

yes, indeed, with his depiction of the rational, mad, and logical battle in which men transcend themselves, mcqueen has truly shocked me.

please do address the last bit. i really need help understanding what the fuck he is talking about.

You don't really want help.

And if you do, find a review of a movie I've seen and we'll go from there.

I'm sure Little 'Rique knows I'm not going to debate him point-by-point here -- or at all -- but as the two viewings I've had have been on an IFC screener, I plan to see this again at MoMA next week. (and get an actual DVD and put the subtitles on for the priest scene)

This was not as politically crude as I expected, e.g. I had no problem with the way Thatcher's voice was used. But yeah, if you're going to imply one side is right, you need to explain what they're right about. As people say upthread, full of composition, etc. designed to draw attention to itself in a way that was kind of cheap.

So I guess I basically agree with the last two paragraphs of this: http://www.nerve.com/CS/blogs/screengrab/archive/2009/03/12/screengrab-review-quot-hunger-quot.aspx

explain? It's a motion picture, it's about images.

are you referring to "designed to draw attention to itself in a way that was kind of cheap"?

It's sitting at home. Thoughts later.

This was marvelous.

That was only one thought.

An aperitif.

not that i'm hungry for more, since i haven't seen it yet. i'm sure it (and Revanche) will show up at my house before NxNW, which has been sitting at the top of my queue for about a month now. Starting to hate on netflix.

OK fine. My thoughts.

Totally loved this movie

I finally saw this last night. I can't say that I think it was a good film, but I suppose it I found it kind of an interesting, shallow mess. Glad I didn't pay $10 to see it in a theatre. I don't have a problem with shots that draw attention to themselves (actually I like this) but scenes like the piss corridor and the priest conversation seemed to use exagerrated composition and duration to no real effect. The corridor at least was an interesting shot, I hated the way the conversation was shot and lit. The film's politics also seemed incredibly confused and convenient.

I quite liked some of McQueen's video work, why couldn't he just stick to that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeaTWZTqC2Q

Sheila O'Malley on the 17-minute conversation scene:

http://www.sheilaomalley.com/?p=38358

i love the way fassbender says ~oh aye...~ during the priest scene

Hunger could be a great film if Robert Bresson and A Man Escaped in particular didn't exist.
but they do so it's just very good.