Olivier Assayas Poll

My favorite working filmmaker, I think.

Anyone seen Something in the Air yet?

of what i've seen; irma vep, demonlover, clean, and carlos; it's carlos, no question.

i was not nearly as taken w/ summer hours as many ppl but id still prob vote that (havent seen carlos)

I voted for Summer Hours. That offhand, "slight" little thing kills me.

think it opens in NY this Friday or next.

I will likely be the only person voting for Les Destinees. Then Carlos, Cold Water, Late August Early September.

I've liked them all except Boarding Gate.

Carlos is probably my favorite. We should do an Audiard poll.

Summer Hours, Irma Vep, Cold Water, Demonlovers. I'm unconvinced I need to see the rest.

I saw Clean again recently and it's much more than an excellent Nick Nolte performance. Assayas understands families – blood or makeshift – moving in confined spaces quite well.

Demonlover is my least favorite; I hate cybershit.

Demonlover def his worst that I've seen, have yet to see Clean but of the rest it's gotta be Carlos. I hate throwing masterpiece around, but that one came the closest of anything I've seen in the last few years.

irma vep, haven't seen carlos

Only seen Carlos so I won't vote but it is incredible.

Surprised to say I've seen four. Carlos, easily--looking forward to the new one.

irma vep!

Have, um, never seen any of his films, though Clean, Summer Hours and Carlos have all been somewhere in the depths of my endless "to watch" list. I guess I can let these poll results decide where I should start for me.

Irma Vep and Summer Hours are good starts.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I've only seen Demonlover and Carlos, both of which I liked a lot but Carlos takes it.

From the D.C. thread (Stevie D didn't like Demonlover):

I was just asking about the AFI's separate fest:

May 2–July 1
Hailed by many as the most important of contemporary French filmmakers, Olivier Assayas has made more than 20 films across a diversity of genres, including features, documentaries and shorts.

He directed Irma Vep and Carlos and others (and includes Sonic Youth, John Cale & Pixies music on the soundtrack in some--says the blurb), and that controversial one Stevie says to skip (soulds like good advice).

― curmudgeon, Monday, April 29, 2013 5:29 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
sounds

― curmudgeon, Monday, April 29, 2013 5:30 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
it's not even controversial it's just boring and poorly made.

― siouxsan sarandon (Stevie D(eux)), Monday, April 29, 2013 5:35 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
you can skip Boarding Gate too. Summer Hours/Irma Vep/Carlos essential.

― Gukbe, Monday, April 29, 2013 5:38 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

boarding gate isn't that bad. it's just... really trashy.

I've only seen Demonlover and Carlos, both of which I liked a lot but Carlos takes it.

― 誤訳侮辱, Monday, April 29, 2013 7:37 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

demonlover was nuts! loved it.

but it's gotta be Carlos.

more like olivier assy-ass am i right?

ugh demonlover was so dull

Summer Hours is my favorite of those I've seen, I think. Carlos was also very good.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I saw Irma Vep when I was in HS and I didnt get it. Peace

Summer Hours one of my faves of the last five years.

Something In The Air is a real drag

I'm cool with the three finalists.

Something in the Air (orig title: Apres Mai) is not a real drag, but I suppose it is a sort of downer-sequel to Cold Water, as it's set in the going-downhill era of student radicalism (1971-72), and CW had a better (or more original?) bonfire scene.

And looking at this dude is not any kind of drag:

http://images.movieplayer.it/2012/12/14/qualcosa-nell-aria-clement-metayer-in-una-scena-del-film-261174.jpg

They were all very pretty but the lead actress in particular was a cinematic sedative

she was a Serious Young Lady, didn't bother me.

Pretty close to Number None above on Something in the Air--pedestrian, anyway (or maybe I've just seen variations on this basic material too many times now). And the deadpan of everyone--lead guy in particular--wears me down after a while. Doesn't anyone here ever smile? The Nick Drake song was nice, and I've got to track down the Kevin Ayers song played over the end credits.

Watching this tonight.

had a really gd time at this, last night. i thought it was actually quite different subject matter for a film - the immediate post-'68 period of european leftism, which in some ways was an even more ideological/political battleground - and something that i thought the film articulated really well in places (ie that great scene in the village square where the audience and filmmakers hash out the clash between radical politics and radical film representation - nice little non-didactic laying out of 'what was at stake'). ok, maybe it's another coming-of-age/coming-of-adult-disillusionment romance, but it looked gorgeous (including all the gorgeous pouting lead performers), the music was spot on throughout (dr strangely strange! and i liked the faux-prog gig in purple), i was sold on all the fire imagery (burning corso's 'gasoline' as an act of remembrance) and its sun-stroked sense of drift (from country to country, lover to lover). i have also stayed at that incredible palatial youth hostel in venice and was stunned to see it featured in the film (tho' i did notice an out-of-period electronic indicator on a london underground scene)

and the lead actor dude was totally laughing, never mind smiling, in that terrif scene abt simenon and maigret

youth hostel in FLORENCE

Maybe someone else can watch for that--I remember him as being irritated in that scene, not amused. I honestly don't remember him ever breaking out of that one flat, neutral expression he had the whole way. Which sometimes can work for me--Anzavour in Don't Shoot the Piano Player--but usually doesn't. I remember even Anzavour wryly smiling at times, though, or even someone like Hackman in The Conversation.

Don't mean to fixate on that one point. Three things I liked: the bonfire party made me nostalgic for that time in my life when I drugged and drank and didn't care; the elliptical ending was nice; and the Kevin Ayers song, which I've identified as "Decadence" from '73 or so.

and the lead actor dude was totally laughing, never mind smiling, in that terrif scene abt simenon and maigret

Terrific when you think of the relationship between cinema and TV, its almost as if Assayas was wanting to put across how wrong he was about what his father was up to? (guessing this is part-autobiog) and of course when you think about how cinephilia went to hell to today where its wall-to-wall HBO. You see that scene and think to the awful Bradshaw rev in The Guardian where he knocks it for nostalgia and you think wtf was he watching. It is nostalgia, but in scenes like this there are no illusions.

re: music, Beefheart's Abba Zaba was nice to hear, liked that he wasn't that bothered to aargh 'soundtrack' the early 70s.

Ward Fowler otm

Yeah

Forgot the flipping-through-records scene--obviously an homage to Almost Famous. (Yes, kidding.) That was great.

The Slant review gets at some of the reasons why the film fell short for me.

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/something-in-the-air

Gilles and Christine are relatively bland, albeit pretty, ciphers...the film, enveloping as it is, proves woefully short on burning dramatic or thematic intensity.

I don't know that I needed burning intensity, but something along that road would have helped. I love Carlos.

Richard Brody didn't like it.

I did.

he's kind of a chameleon, in terms of the thematics and subject matter of his films. something about his body of work feels modish--not as obviously or as crassly as, like, gus van sant or tsai ming liang or something, but just like he's making films to be cool or something. i know that's not a very sophisticated criticism. he just doesn't seem to have a recognizably original approach, and he ends up doing the same boring handheld camera thing for most of his films. i admit seeing "irma vep" twice--when it came out, and then about four years ago--and didn't "get" it either time... by which i mean, didn't get what critics seemed to feel was so startlingly original or incisive about it. it felt like he was making the film _for_ critics, in a way, and thus everything kind of reduced to this low-frequency feedback loop.

i admit i kind of put him and arnaud desplechin in the same box in my mind, though i recognize that he's probably a more interesting filmmaker than desplechin (whose films i mostly cannot stand).

my mom really liked summer hours.

i really liked cold water and, to a lesser extent, carlos.

also the poll skipped a few of his features, no? or maybe just désordre (which I haven't seen)?

how do you pronounce his name, anyway? ah-say-ahz?

he ends up doing the same boring handheld camera thing for most of his films.

disagree? At some point in his last three films his camera will lose interest in people and note these people's interaction with the environment. It's quite moving. He's probably my favorite living director, which sounds more pretentious than I intend.

Where Brody is hopelessly wrong is noting how Assayas is modish in the best sense: his characters have lived through the allusions they make to literature, film, poli sci, etc.

There are some lovely camera movements around the French countryside, then iirc, those crane shots are mirrored in the last scene in the studio as they are making a film-within-a-film.

Gilles and Christine are relatively bland, albeit pretty, ciphers...the film, enveloping as it is, proves woefully short on burning dramatic or thematic intensity.

They were young, enthusiastic and waywardly trying - and that to varying degrees? Besides, to have a film showing a kind of "drama of their times" when you look around today n Europe - where it seems little has changed, or that there is so much left to change - would be simply wrong.

Only Assayas and Denis come out with anything that happens to be both French and worth seeing.

saw this a couple of days ago, and really liked it. tho it's decades earlier, i kept seeing certain friends or myself in gilles, & i thought of a young hoos more than once. sexy dark-eyed anarchists are still out there trying to deal with maoists & trotskyites, god love em.

christine dealing with her partner's conflation of feminists with lesbians! u know she has to do her activist work and then take care of everything else while the men talk. that shit is often elided when we look back like this, and since early the film had shown girls were well-represented in the lycee movement, this was a strong & kind of necessary scene to me.

when her & gilles meet on a street at night post-break up & stand close together having one of those conversations u have when there's enough distance to evaporate ill feeling but not enough to deaden all the other stuff, you can see the attraction flashing back & forth between them. when she says "you know i always liked all your stuff" her voice wavers and her love wells up like something tangible.

but gilles has a thing for laure that feels in the nature of a first love; laure who looked cold-eyed at his work, rejecting this, selecting that. i wondered what it meant that his most representational art was of christine.

something else going on in that scene with christine when he points out they took liberties with his work. it's not just the complaints and depreciations of a young person praised for an example of limited success, but of a kind with the gels for the band & the ridiculous british film. tho the camera lingers on their creativity, they are disappointments woefully short of society re-imagined.

even tho there is so much talk of form and style in the film, i seem to have been too interested in the melieu & characters to notice the film's own technique. but it didn't seem at all similar to the hand-held restlessness of irma vep, which often produced dramatic close-up off-centre framings. even when i noticed laure moving around the party in an extended take with lots of camera movement, she's fully in frame or caught in mid-shot, and the shot is stately and dreamy, which is probably how her last hit felt.

http://logger.believermag.com/post/53036565653/bringing-your-ghosts-to-life-interview-with-film

On Assayas' remake of The bitter Tears of Petra von Kant: http://thefilmexperience.net/blog/2014/10/9/nyff-maria-dances-on-the-mountain-tops.html

clouds of sils maria was p good

I watch it tomorrow.

stoked to see, love this guy

yes, stoked for the madness.

I liked it quite a bit more the second time I saw it, but I don't think I'll ever be a big Assayas fan.

Did not even know about this. Like the Film Experience blog post above says, I love Assayas, Binoche and Petra von Kant, so I am favorably disposed. Can totally see Binoche in that role.

should I have seen pvk before seeing this

I should really get around to it anyway

Everyone should see PVK! It's great.

ya but do I need to have

iyo

I haven't seen the Assayas, so I don't know. Probably be interesting to compare the two no matter what order you see them in.

i doubt there's a strong stylistic similarity

Affecting, and in the last half hour shrewd. Assayas' use of a Rohmer-indebted natural wonder as conceit and structural framework is better than his leaden dialogue, which often sounds like Woody Allen thinks his intellectuals in the eighties sound like. Stewart is never not boring.

ya but do I need to have

― nults of 2 ppl don't amount to a will have beens in this crazy (wins),

No. This turned out to be a publicity MacGuffin.

was v impressed by its world creation, & also what it withholds -- ie the "new" pages of the play & what binoche's perf of the younger role was like

Are we ready for spoiler-discussions of this film? I have a biggie I want to ask about.

Go for it.

saw Mia Hansen-Love's Eden recently, and was struck by how reminiscent it was of Something In The Air. In fact it's basically the same film with the (in)action transposed to the French house scene in the 90s/00s

I was grousing about this to my viewing companion who slightly blew my mind when he told me that she and Assayas are married

Ok. SPOILER WARNING!

Does Valentine kill herself? The first time I saw it, I just thought that she waited a bit, and then left the other way, but right before she dissapears, she and Maria discuss the ending of 'Maloja Snake' and how Helena's suicide is never shown, but just intuited because the actress disappears from the stage. And more to that, what happens between Valentine and the photographer? There are hints of something really dark going on with Val, which nobody seems to bother figuring out, while every little detail of Jo-Ann's life is blown-up and magnified.

I thought it was an Antonioni-esque reminder of Valentine's unimportance. She's an employee. She can be replaced at any time. She may have died, wandered off, who knows.

I didn't care much about her fling w/the photographer -- not enough information.

Jo-Ann's novelist boyfriend? Rowr.

you probably wnted to read an analysis of this film AND Furious 7 in the context of poptimism, right?

http://filmcomment.com/entry/bombast-pop-pop-pop-popular

LOL at that:

I detect something like the language which has been used in the discussion around the by-no-means-new issue of rockism vs. poptimism, one of the defining dichotomies of the last decade of pop writing. To recap: the rockist is a devotee of small-band guitar/bass/drum music; he is also, the grievance goes, usually a “he,” and touts the authenticity of the music that he listens to over that of the poptimists. The poptimist is open to various pop/hip-hop/electro/R&B/dance idioms which invite an ethnically diverse/female/LBGTQ fan base, idioms dismissed as synthetic by the rockists who, until relatively recently, at least, held all of the most important positions in music journalism.

Don't they teach anything at school these days!

I live in fucking envy of ppl who need the recap

whoa nice

Mess of a piece.

tl;dr but how many Furious films are better than Nick Jonas?

How many Assayas films are?

Its barely literate but at least history will validate his opinion that Assayas > Fast and Furious 7. In the end, this is all that matters.

well i'm pretty sure Best Coast > Demonlover

xp

Nick Jonas >>>>> Changing Gates

er Boarding Gate, although I did want to change gates.

we need a comprehensive poll of alfred's always-marketable malaprop titles

as soon as I rescreen the real ones

It seems inevitable that Pinkerton's column will eventually conclude that everything is pointless and we should all just give up. He might be right.

Sils Maria kiiinda sucks!

Nah. My complaint is how rubbish Assayas' ear for dialogue gets when he gets thematic.

Only liked the scene where Binoche laughs hysterically when Stewart tries to convince her of the depth of X-Men movies.

He's thematic for 124 minutes!

Most of the outdoor scenes with Binoche and Stewart have a nice snap, and it's a relief to watch a director find ways to avoid static two shots. And the hotel bar scene with Jo-Ann was particularly elegant.

For all the didactic dialogue Assayas does allow himself the escape valve of letting Binoche express contempt for the shitty play she starred in all those years ago.

but not the shitty movie we're watching her in.

I wouldn't say 'sucks', there's a bunch of things I like in it. Better than Something in the Air. There are def things in it that sucks, though, the biggest one for me is all the unconvincing footage from the things Jo-Ann has been in. The unconvincing laughter in the interview is particularly cringeworthy.

SITA is much better, but I suppose I prefer Assayas movies that keep more of a distance between the characters and me.

on second-plus viewing, sils maria still isn't summer hours, but have started to feel similar affection for it (or is it just the leads?).

y'all didn't get it btw. it's ok, i didn't quite the first time either.

really need to see more from him

love how female/adult it is compared to the male/adolescent Nolanworld it's partly telling off

CGM makes me cringe but she's kinda supposed to. That she might not yield the same reaction from the four people she drew to see this is also kinda the point.

My favorite working filmmaker, I think.

Anyone seen Something in the Air yet?

― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, April 25, 2013 8:34 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I voted for Summer Hours. That offhand, "slight" little thing kills me.

― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, April 25, 2013 8:36 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

New one looks interesting.

http://gu.com/p/4j9hv?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Bit of a spidery review there btw, as is Bradshaw's way.

Eh, spoilery

Clouds of sils Maria is embarrassingly bad, no? Holy shit, tottally cringing here.

you & i are in the minority it seems.

I'm closer to "not very good" after a second viewing

congrats on Cannes, Olivier!

seeing tom'w

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-nyff-2016-olivier-assayass-personal-shopper

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgjN3x415Mg

Anders Danielsen Lie is in this! hubba hubba

saw this last night -- stewart was magnificent. enjoyed the Q+A too

it's a ghost movie, and i don't like em. It's better than Sils Maria at least (tho KS not quite as casually brilliant).

Not to derail the thread, but after watching KS in Certain Women last night I'm tempted to call her the best young American actress.

haven't seen enough of her work to comment definitively but she was seriously so great in this -- such a demanding role, it seemed like she was in almost every shot

morbs if you saw the saturday afternoon showing i was probably walking out of "julieta" as you were walking in! wasn't a good time to socialize but next time i'm in the city you, jordan and i should catch a mets game

fine with me!

yeah KS was on the cover of Film Comment 2 months ago, having at least a moment

irma vep was pretty fun!

I guess Personal Shopper is a 2017 release

PS limited opening tomorrow; willing to revisit someday. I was meh on it tho it has some suspenseful texting lol

OA says

To put it as simply as I can, I wanted to make a movie about the tension in modern societies between the stupid jobs a lot of people do and their spiritual longings. I think that the modern world is giving a lot of space to the material world by being such a consumer society, and with jobs that are increasingly weird, defined by new areas of the economy. We feel so much like pawns in the material world, which does not really respect our own spiritual longings, and I think we all in one way or another have to create our alternative to the material world. There is not so much religion around, so it has to be defined in other ways in terms of our relationship to art, to whatever, it’s all one in the same thing. So I wanted to create a character that would embody that tension, and then it evolved into something different and expanded....

I think that movies are always about something else than what they seem to be about, in some way or another. A few days ago I saw the Ken Loach film I, Daniel Blake, which has been received as some sort of epitome of social filmmaking. Yes, sure, of course, it’s there—but I also see a movie of an old man scared of death. I see an old man, who is losing his grip with the world. It’s a very dark film about the human condition. It’s not a social film at all. It’s really like the last Leonard Cohen album.

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/olivier-assayas-lot-say-kristen-stewart

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/09/movies/personal-shopper-review-kristen-stewart.html?referrer=google_kp

I saw Summer Hours recently. Really good. I felt for these people and their possessions.

It's not top drawer Assayas -- I can see the joints holding it together, and Assayas must stop writing expository dialogue and scenes -- but it's moving and spooky enough. Jamesian too -- remidned me of Truffaut's The Green Room Stewart is first-rate.

Anders Danielsen Lie is in this! hubba hubba

― The Hon. J. Piedmont Mumblethunder (Dr Morbius)

and his is the worst scene!

wasn't feelin' his brown hair either

I would say this is minor but it's not not top-drawer. His movies offer such unique pleasures it's hard for me to be too objective about them. I savor/anticipate them so. The crowd I saw it with was terrible and didn't seem to enjoy or even "get" the movie. I would love for him to widen his scope a bit more next time. Stewart is a great muse though.

Stewart is a good actress but there's something dour and depressing about her.

Stewart is a good actress but there's something dour and depressing about her.

Right on. She's really good in a really specific way but she's not a pleasant screen presence. Anthony Lane's New Yorker review of Personal Shopper nailed it for me:

She’ll never be a lovable actress, but neither can she be ignored; she’s so on, and so bereft of peace. She fidgets, twitches, snaps at her lines as if they were candies, and mops her hand over her face in the hope of wiping her cares away.

"bereft of peace" is a good turn of phrase to describe the tone of PS. So unsettled and unsettling.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/20/personal-shopper-and-frantz

I think that movies are always about something else than what they seem to be about, in some way or another. A few days ago I saw the Ken Loach film I, Daniel Blake, which has been received as some sort of epitome of social filmmaking. Yes, sure, of course, it’s there—but I also see a movie of an old man scared of death. I see an old man, who is losing his grip with the world. It’s a very dark film about the human condition. It’s not a social film at all. It’s really like the last Leonard Cohen album.

god, the french and their love of abstraction. there isn't an extra layer to literally any movie that loach and lavery have ever done.

i thought stewart was so fantastic in the latest one

kept vacillating between being bored and utterly transfixed during Personal Shopper. The opening and the ending were brilliant, and that goes a long way. The best film I've seen this year, a great slow burn. sooooooo much better than Clouds of Sils Maria zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

hm idk i preferred sils maria to this; still dug shopper ok, lotta layers

via press release...

Assayas will write and direct Wasp Network, which is based on Fernando Morais’ book, The Last Soldiers of the Cold War.

Wasp Network is the unbelievable true story of Cuban spies in American territory during the 90's which reveals the tentacles of a terrorist network based in Florida with ramifications in Central America and with the consent of the US government.

cannot pull all the threads together yet (or maybe ever), but I thought Personal Shopper was tremendous. KS is so good it almost seemed that the movie as a whole was a meta-textual statement about her persona/performance.

yeah i saw it at NYFF and am still thinking about it

"it's me" - fade to white. one of my favorite endings in recent memory.

We just saw Personal Shopper yesterday, really enjoyed it. It's been a while since I saw Demonlover so my memory is a bit hazy, but I felt like this one did a better job the whole ghost-in-the-machine techno-disorientation vibe. And Kristen Stewart was really good -- she was in just about every scene, it's a heavy lift.

Did a better job WITH the...

Personal Shopper! Watched it last night. It's very good. And yes, Stewart was great in it.

I was blown away by Personal Shopper. Easily my favorite movie of 2017 so far. Incredible ending- that last shot (!!).

Can't understand Jean-Pierre Leaud's accent whilst speaking English in Irma Vep much of the time, and I've seen it before.

Sure would like to see this:

http://www.monabismarck.org/events/conversation-on-culture-greil-marcus-mai-68

Saw Cold Water last night. The whole bonfire segment was incredible.

Assayas did, if you take notice of such things, slip up with music chronology a couple of times. The film is set in '72, and "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" and "Cosmic Wheels" are '73. I doubt it was a slip-up, though, I think more likely he (wisely) didn't care.

I had the same reaction to the bonfire sequence - I didn't know much about it going in, and it was a lot bleaker than I was expecting, but that section was perfect. I loved how great/terrible the kids were at DJing - the audible scratches when changing records, just deciding to go back to the start of "Up Around the Bend" halfway through, etc.

This could use a repoll.

Cold Water is a superb first draft of Something in the Air.

I loved Irma Vep, Carlos, and Clouds of Sils Maria, need to watch Cold Water for the first time, need to rewatch Clean, Demonlover, Summer Hours and most of all Personal Shopper (which I liked but didn't really get the first time)

deciding to go back to the start of "Up Around the Bend" halfway through, etc.

That was a highlight, and then the way the camera mostly stayed on the one guy (maybe the guy who moved the tonearm back to the beginning) in the throes of hippie sun-grope bliss. Kind of an easy, slow-motion sun-grope.

I found Non-Fiction an arch, garrulous film that's a dud as sex farce and commentary on The Way We Live Now. His characters talk about the internet with less savvy than Sandra Bullock in 1995.

Yep, pretty much a total dud. One of my biggest disappointments at last year's TIFF.

it's as if Assayas wanted to pick up Woody Allen's 2010s mantle with Non-Fiction. I liked it fine, my expectations were tamped by Alfred & Simon's post, but yeah compared to the last two a dud. but I enjoy 2010s Woody Allen fine.

surprised Eric liked Cold Water so much given all the klassik rokk

That's like saying you're surprised I hated Thank God It's Friday so much given all the disco.

I remembered the bonfire party centerpiece pretty well, but otherwise the core of the film is very familiar, incl the Tragic Babe embodied by Ledoyen. Very well made from scene to scene of course, but I don't get the claims of greatness.

and he repeated the bonfire sequence to more sublime effect in Summer Hours.

well that i don't remember at all

it's at the end

Girish Shambu situates Cold Water as an "art-teen movie"

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5916-cold-water-dancing-on-the-ruins

They're not art movies, but there is much art in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Clueless.

and Heathers!

well, Girish points you toward Bresson and Yang

His list is fine, but it seems to be based on marketing--this is an art film, this is a commercial teen comedy--not artistic quality. To me, it's not that different than saying On the Beach must be a better film than Psycho, because On the Beach is about nuclear annihilation and the fate of mankind, while Psycho's about a murderer who keeps his mother's corpse locked in the basement. Many film critics would have subscribed to that in 1960.

Norman only moves his mother's corpse from her bed to the basement near the end of the movie

I'm sort of in the dark about what the discrepancy is here, clem.

Just that I think Fast Times and Clueless belong with the films he listed, but I get the sense--maybe I'm wrong--that the writer thinks non-English films about teenagers are inherently more artistic.

Oh, in that case I think you're wrong.

There are art-film releases and multiplex releases in the USA, at least in the last 44 years.

Right--which kind of circles back to my point that his notion of "art-teen movie" is grounded in marketing, not art. But I think we're going in circles now.

I think he's way more interested in art than teens, tbh.

But to each their own.

I haven't read that essay but I just watched Cold Water and it is in a completely different universe than Fast Times, Clueless, Heathers, Dazed & Confused. Yeah, "art teen movie" is otm.

(xpost) He's not though. Else he'd list Fast Times and Clueless alongside those other films.

Impasse.

I'm not trying to be willfully stubborn here. But I am going to be stubborn. We're talking past each other.

If "art-teen movie" is a genre based on how a film is marketed, its target audience, etc., then his examples make perfect sense.

But if "art-teen movie" is a genre based on how artistic a movie about teenagers is--how much it has to say about life, how much it has to say about the experience of being a teenager--then Fast Times and Clueless belong. Cold Water is a really good film--I saw it twice and would see it again. Fast Times at Ridgemont High is a better film than Cold Water. It's not great as in "great for what it is." It's a great film period.

"art film" means something specific, and it doesn't mean a "popular film" can't be art. But we all know 95% of Americans having an Edward Yang film sprung on them would walk out in 10 minutes.

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lol

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FFS

Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which I've no fondness for but that's beside the point, is not an art movie ffs.

I think it boils down to Virginie Ledoyen vs Phoeve Cates

I think we all know what this boils down to.

Nico vs the Go-Go's

I think we all know what this boils down to.

Please, continue.

Please stop.

I was trying to making a point, and I was civil the whole way. It's you who turns impulsively rude in these situations. You made some vague allusion above--I'm supposed to leave something like that unchecked? Say precisely what you want to say. And if you don't want me to respond, stop descending into nonsense like that.

Sorry for being rude, but it's a lesser sin than believing that someone writing on art films about teens, even on as consumer-minded a forum as the Criterion Collection's website, made a grievous error for not making sure to name-check Clueless.

I don't think I called it a grievous error--I understand the context in which he's writing--I'm simply saying he's making a distinction I don't agree with.

It's funny because Cold Water comes up in the liner essay (by Kent Jones?) for the CC Dazed & Confused.

I'll try to find that online, sounds good. That's how I see these things: as a continuum, not this group of films and that group of films.

(I'm guessing he makes a specific connection between Cold Water's bonfire party and the keg party in Dazed and Confused?)

It is online:

http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/424-dazed-and-confused-dream-on

Dazed and Confused was marketed as a teen comedy by the clueless Universal offshoot Gramercy Pictures, when it should have been pitched to those of us in our thirties, who had passed through this odd, floating moment in history when all decisive gestures seemed strange and suspect. One year later, Olivier Assayas would make Wood’s “horror movie” with Cold Water, which gave us the hair-raising anxiety of the seventies. Linklater was after something else..

Yes: how a film is perceived and marketed is not necessarily the same as what it actually is.

Those movies are still really different

also dazed and confused is a great movie to watch as a teen

These days I’m writing for A24 a serial based on my 1996 feature “Irma Vep.” It keeps me busy and I find it very exciting, even stimulating as it has a zany pulp element and also deals with the state of cinema today.

Just rewatched Irma Vep for the first time in probably 20 years. Such a great movie, smart and "meta" and all but still grounded in Maggie Cheung's character/performance.

I rewatched it two weeks ago and otm

I rewatched it about two years ago when it showed up and MUBI and yeah.

I love the little Godard/New Wave pastiche at the end when they show the bit of film that Rene had completed. Meanwhile, Assayas gets to make his own Hong Kong/Feuillade mash-up in the scene where she steals the necklace.

Only saw Irma Vep once, a few years ago, but he does the same thing (really well) in Something in the Air, ending with a clip of an experimental film his old girlfriend Laure is in.

(With a great Kevin Ayers song playing.)

Wasp Network is only the second of his films that I've seen (after Personal Shopper, which I really like) so I have no real way to fit it into his filmography. It's a pretty straightforward espionage thriller based on true events; the story is interesting (I don't remember the incident from the very scattered attention I paid to the news in the mid 90s) enough and the performances are fine, but as a film it is kinda generic, I suppose. Perhaps this explains why I am seeing almost zero discussion of it anywhere?

Have only seen Personal Shopper and Carlos, both of which I love - based on those, I feel like I'd be pretty into the idea of him doing a straightforward espionage thriller

I didn't like it. Generic is otm. Haven't seen Carlos but a friend told me the new one is basically a worse version.

The perfect couple pic.twitter.com/08VJAVm0tk

— Nicky Smith (@nickyotissmith) February 9, 2021

Non-Fiction was on Kanopy so I watched it purely because it was Assayas... my God it was awful!

Anyone watch the Irma Vep miniseries? I just finished the first episode, which I enjoyed. Hard for me to imagine that even at eight hours it will supplant the original for me, but it’s pretty entertaining on its own.

The original?

I mean the original Irma Vep movie, not the original Les Vampires.

I thought it was excellent!

demonlover robbed

The new Irma Vep series doesn't really go anywhere at all plot-wise (if that is important to people), but it is a nice reflection on the 1996 film and the original 1915-1916 series, and is funny, inventive and visually beautiful

still think about SUMMER HOURS all the time

need to go back to CLOUDS soon, had to turn it off for extradiegetic reasons last month

Summer Hours is close to being my favorite film by anybody.

Irma Vep: The Series was a really fun summer watch. The way things are going I’d be surprised if HBO funds another hour long show so niche and low stakes any time soon.

Odd sentence from the Assayas Wikipedia entry: "His work has become synonymous with the film movement known as the New French Extremity ..."

Maybe you could put Demonlover in there, but that's a long way from his work being synonymous. I've never classed him with that group at all.

Right up there with Arnaud Desplechin among horror-heads.

when I saw the Irma Vep series I had just rewatched Maren Ade’s Everyone Else (a film I liked much more on second viewing). It also starred Lars Eidinger, and I thought it was interesting to see the comparison between his roles in those

Finished the TV series, a good diversion during COVID week. I loved it! It's completely ridiculous that it even exists (as several characters note at various points), it's inherently self-indulgent, but it's so much fun. The last episode is pretty glorious, it's really firing on all cylinders.

I watched Summer Hours again this afternoon: the best film of the 2000s (that decade, to be clear). So wise about property and the benign indifference b/w siblings and parents. I know no other film like it.

Is it still the image on your homepage? Haven’t checked in a while.

Not anymoe.

I liked it a lot, will have to see it again.

I'm still thinking about the new version of Irma Vep, a story about the chaos and chemistry of making movies, and about how successful filmmaking involves many accidents - personal relationships, fortuitous casting, productive clashes between film departments. I loved that it made many references to Assayas' first iconic Irma Vep (1996) as well as to the original source of inspiration, Les Vampires from 1916

I still think Boarding Gate is really underrated, the sense of movement is so thrilling (same as in Demonlover I suppose)

Watched the early short film Laissé inachevé à Tokyo with Elli Medeiros - the plot is kind of nothing (bored author goes to Japan and gets involved with/escapes from gangsters, told non-linearly) but it's absolutely beautiful to look at and well worth 20 minutes of your time.

omg demonlover

beyond description, a thriller that barely has a story and if there is one its plot movements only occur only in the unconscious senses, in diffracted reflections, in the cold light droning from computer screens, also contains tentacle hentai and gimp outfits, the best movie ever made

like an episode of succession that gradually wanders into a dennis cooper novel

loved watching the power relationships in this film invert and revert and spiderweb with the film barely remarking on it at all

It's a hell of a trip, that film.

It deserved a couple votes.

Kind of want to watch Carlos again, the cinema version, never saw the miniseries, maybe will finally watch Demonlover first.

Maybe I did watch Demonlover before but have forgotten it, so another reason to watch.

Recommend the whole Carlos series! I enjoyed the immersion.

Indeed. A real kick.

Not easy to stream it, unfortunately.

can't believe you hadn't watched demonlover, brad

now go see boarding gate next!!

started from the bottom
now we're here

dreamlover on Criterion Channel!

er Demonlover

Finally watched Something in the Air after meaning to forever. Very much enjoyed it, I thought it was charming and evocative. Traffics in a certain level of nostalgic romanticism, but that's OK with me. I'm kind of a sucker for that whole era.

Have you seen Cold Water? It's like a blueprint for Something in the Air, and--I think--much better.

No, it's also been on the mean-to list for a while. I should.

Watched Alfred's beloved Summer Hours tonight. Very good!

It is! Following up on my comment above, I did watch Cold Water, and liked it a lot too. I thought it was interesting how it was less explicitly political, more about the connections between the characters. Even the bomb-making seems as much like an art project as anything. The two movies make a good pair.

Assayas on the difference:

The thing that is strange for me about Cold Water is that this movie was shot in the mid-nineties, but when I looked at the film again while doing the restoration, it felt like the seventies. Instead of being a retro re-creation of the seventies, it deals with something that’s at the core of those years. It’s a movie I could have made as a teenager if I was making movies at that point.

...Years later, when I made Something in the Air, which is about teenagers during the same period, I had a hard time making the kids understand what the seventies were about. The politics, the energy, and the relationship to culture and music—I had to explain that. They played it, but I’m not sure they completely understood it. But when I was making Cold Water in the mid-nineties, there was no misunderstanding. They knew exactly what this was about.

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5594-of-their-age-olivier-assayas-on-the-making-of-cold-water

(Cold Water is also obviously the more autobiographical of the two)

Loved Summer Hours. Kept expecting the movie to contract around some point of conflict and it just never happens, conflicts happen, get resolved or don't, and things just flow along.

Less political, for sure. My preference for Cold Water, no surprise, has a lot to do with its soundtrack. The big party with the bonfire is one of the greatest sustained sequences ever that leans on an unbroken series of pop songs.

Loved Summer Hours. Kept expecting the movie to contract around some point of conflict and it just never happens, conflicts happen, get resolved or don't, and things just flow along.

― rainbow calx (lukas),

Few films understand family dynamics over money like this one. His best.

Yeah I think Summer Hours is really profound about families and also about time.

it just never happens

My favourite example of this in his films is the non-climactic non-deathbed conclusion of Les destinées sentimentales.

an unbroken series of pop songs

I just remember "Up Around the Bend" played over and over. I was disappointed they never flipped the record to play "Run Through the Jungle".

The new Suspended Time, set in France during early lockdown (March-April 2020), is an often interesting mix of nostalgia and despair. Assayas narrates quasi-documentary about his rural family home while the "real" film unfolds.

watching demonlover again b/c why not

I would be interested to hear what you think of it on a rewatch. I only saw it when it came out, and wasn’t to taken with it. Seemed messy and incoherent. But its techno-pessimism might scan differently 20 years later.