The Safdie brothers' NYC crime/chase thriller GOOD TIME, starrting Robert Pattinson as a Queens lowlife

Almost deserving of its Film Comment cover... and RP's dialect sounds impeccable. Opens in the US August 11.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrR-SbCRgCU

JJL is a national treasure

she's fine, but probably onscreen just 10 minutes

yeah I know it just reminded me how underrated she is (no oscars for her)

I also liked their junkie neorealism drama Heaven Knows What, but this is a more elaborate and spell-casting thing. Some clear Scorsese/Cassavetes/Walter Hill influences, but not oppressive about it.

all sounds good to me

def in on this, heaven knows what was kinda disappointing as I recall or I just cant stomach miserablist junkie drama anymore

well this is kinda miserabilist too, but much more kinetic.

I just cant stomach miserablist junkie drama anymore

yeah me neither

at least Drugstore Cowboy was a comedy

this 1 seems more palatable. aside from the dope, heaven knows what felt like too over the top voyeuristic young/dumb ppl relationship abuse

there's some p 'transgressive' stuff here too

and plenty of dumbness

the big-nosed bf guy from HKW, Buddy Duress, nearly steals the second half from Pattinson.

doing Twilight sure soured Pattinson and Stewart on Hollywood, huh (as well as making them more than enough dough to do whatever forever, of course)

xp pattinsons making some gd project choices, seemingly; also in that new one shooting now-ish i guess from denis

Stewart really won me over with Clouds of Sils Maria

This looks great

Pattinson was great in Lost City of Z, when he commits & it's a movie worth his commitment, it really shows

This film is already getting some accusations of racism -- I think its deployment of robber-class white-mook privilege is obviously intentional. Amy Taubin likes it:

https://www.artforum.com/film/#entry70360

(btw, spoilers in there)

this was fucking good

ooh this is playing near my work, i might go see it next Tues

they were big fans of using the n word in college so this really feels like their moment

were they? tell me more.

they were obsessed with the wire and one of them (b4n iirc) needed to be talked out of dressing up as omar for halloween

also big fans of slam poetry

they're white arty guys from Queens

also Dick Gregory said you shd never call it "the N word"

none of this is surprising

anyway, good movie!

the soundtrack to this was also so good

wiki -

[I]Lopatin had previously contributed scoring work to Sofia Coppola's 2013 film The Bling Ring (in collaboration with Brian Reitzell) and Ariel Kleiman's 2015 film Partisan.[4] He became interested in working with the Safdie brothers when they sent him a mood board that featured images from "completely unrelated stuff, like a picture of SpongeBob and then weird heist imagery."[5] The Safdie brothers were previously fans of the Oneohtrix Point Never track "Behind the Bank."[5] Josh Safdie explained that "I had always imagined Dan’s work, especially his earlier work, as soundtracks to movies that never existed."[6]

During recording, the brothers invoked the work German electronic group Tangerine Dream but also encouraged Lopatin to experiment and make the music "more fucked up," including influences from prog rock, which helped him to avoid "mimetically revert[ing] to Edgar Froese—it's just in my DNA."[4] He reached out to Iggy Pop to record for the movie's ending after his manager told him to "think big."[4] Lopatin also described the recording as an update of his earlier synthesizer-based work, stating that "I wanted to make something that sounded like Good Time back when I was doing the early stuff, but I didn’t quite know how yet."[4] The Sadie brothers characterized it as if "OPN took everything he learned on "R Plus Seven, Replica, Garden of Delete and did a sequel to Rifts."[7][/]

Wanna see but I'm kinda feeling johnny crunch's comment above about not having the stomach for miserablist junkie drama that I used to have (granted even at 23 I almost walked out of Requiem for a Dream).

Er 21 I think, whatever.

this one is depraved but not miserablist

whats the word on 'laws of gravity' that taubin references in that article? never heard of it

this felt to me like After Hours but with no humor

not inherently a bad thing tho. I did enjoy it for its oddball-isms

audience I saw it with was laughing quite a lot

LoG was a not-bad Tarantino clone, most notable for young Edie Falco.

considering checking this out on the strength of the soundtrack alone.

yea i watched laws of gravity, eh i see the ref to this but its too basic, etc

I kept confusing Pattinson for Timberlake in the movie. not cos of how he acted or whatnot, just the look.

also kept wonderin, wouldn't bail bond guy have liked, called some authorities when he got obviously ink-pack stained money from dude?

the scene in the amusement park was the best IMO

we could ask him, he's a real bail bondsman.

I liked this a lot. took me some time to adjust to the intensity, they don't really ease you into it. I saw it described as darkly comic but I didn't get much humor out of it other than just jesus look at these fuck ups

Dude not recognizing patient wasnt his bro the most comic. Had to weigh like twice what pointynose weighed

The balcony perspective shot at the end was dope

i find stupidity v funny

pattinson was great but the acting was good across the board, i thought ray and crystal were also excellent. one of those movies that i like more the next day. only flaw was it didn't really feel like it had an ending, it just kind of stopped.

dude who played Ray was in their last one too, and was in prison between the two.

i liked this a lot. the extreme closeups on faces is effective huh \o/

could've gone on for longer (i was a bit surprised and, tbh, disappointed when SPOILER he finally got apprehended, even though he's literally the worst person ever) but maybe wise to have cut it short

better than PERSONAL SHOPPER imo

Surprised at how much I loved this. Been skeptical, but the music and the colors were great, and the end felt surprisingly emotional.

I loved how the colors of the haunted house had seeped out into the rest of the film. The whole film is a horror show. But on the other hand there's such patience from the driver of the ambulance, and the helpers at the end.

into the Criterion closet

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4919-josh-and-benny-safdie-s-closet-picks

lol i love those videos

Last 2 days for NYers to see this in 35mm at Film Forum

This opened the Cork Film Festival last Friday night. Brilliant film, probably the best Ive seen this year

I could sworn this came out months ago, guess not.

it did

in some places!

it came out "in Chicago" months ago

Maybe a year and a half ago, when my bf was looking for tenants for his work/studio/shop spaces in Long Island City, someone approached him from this movie and temporarily rented one of his spaces to shoot some scenes. Apparently the film people were like, "Look, the deal is that you can't tell anyone Robert Pattinson is here" and he replied "Don't worry, I don't even know who he is."

hah, did you? i'm trying to figure out if your fantasy-genre jones would encompass Twilight

This gave me a headache. I did like the one guy's acid story, though.

My interests never included Twilight but my professional obligations did: I worked on all of those books and we kept printing them over and over again for years.

I got the screener today, will watch tomorrow.

Kinda loved this, felt dazed for a couple hours afterwards. Flappy otm, Chinese Bookie seemed the obvious comparison, the moment 0pn's score began immediately reminded me of the bass starting as Gazzara is walking past the outside of the the club.

finally saw this last night. It definitely petered out at the end but I really liked it overall. RPattz was great, reminded me of some lowlife dudes my sister used to knock around with. He really had that desperate, hungry-animal quality - he always quick at thinking on his feet but hilariously bad at ~planning~ more than a step or two ahead
plan B = do a thing
“...”
“FUCK!!”
and plan C/D/E =rinse-repeat

good stuff

Their film the pleasure of being robbed was on mubi earlier this/last year and this feels like a development of that to some extent, the instinctive (often begrudging) generosity of people and the people who capitalise on that to get along, fucking others over in the process. The earlier film seems to have a little more sympathy for the fucker-over but both are about blithe privilege to an extent

Also this was tense as fuuuck

Tried to watch this with my partner and it was not a good choice, didn't get much past the title card (too tense, mostly).

from The Current:

Josh and Benny Safdie have reteamed with Good Time (2017) coscreenwriter Ronald Bronstein for Uncut Gems, in which Adam Sandler plays a jewelry dealer whose merchandise is stolen. The cast also features Lakeith Stanfield, Idina Menzel, Judd Hirsch, Eric Bogosian, Pom Klementieff, and The Weeknd.

that cast!

Judd Hirsch is getting all the old Fyvush Finkel roles

Found the ending scene that plays over the credits of this really moving. The semi documentary sensitivity toward the brother (and the tension tied to his vulnerwbility) is an odd combination with all night long “dumb people doing crime” seedy vibe but works really well. Contrast that distinguishes it.

couple added cast members accding to the wiki~

Mike Francesa
Trinidad James
Kevin Garnett

so Sandler is at a Knicks game when his merch is stolen?

holy shit @ MF

meh, could be hype. Cellino & Barnes were technically in the last one.

This can get its own thread, but their new one with Sandler sounds really good:

https://www.indiewire.com/2019/08/uncut-gems-review-adam-sandler-1202170245/

most intrigued that the DP on the new one is Darius Khondji

https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/9/13/20863325/uncut-gems-marriage-story-review-tiff

Finally got around to this (it’s on Amazon Prime). P good! Def unusual. Did not understand whose penthouse they were in at the end but whatever.

i thought it belonged to the security guard though it did seem like a nice place for a security guard. the wiki plot summary also says it belonged to the security guard.

i just watched it last weekend and thought it was excellent. really grabs you from the opening scene and doesn't let up.

I guess I’m getting weak stomached in my middle age but I had to turn this off after the access-a-ride scene. I found it unwatchable. Something overly film student-level exploitation the whole thing and the scenario made me squirm.

There’s also a sort of eeriness to watching it from central queens - I could walk to the supposed location of the bail bondsman in about 20-30 mins.

Went back and finished it. I take back some of what I said, it's good.

fwiw I also started their doc on Lenny Cooke. It feels very similar to Hoop Dreams but it's nicely done, and while it does't have a lot in common with Good Time, it has a similar sensibility of taking people as they are, without a lot of judgment.

So would Uncut Gems feel a lot different for someone who found this unwatchable?

Depends on what you found unwatchable about this. The colour and lighting are very different in Gems (though the shooting style is similar), the score is acting more as an unsettling counterpoint than a propulsive driver, the lead's poor decisions are not based on a supposed intent to protect someone else...

I thought GT was great - unpredictable , inspired , real. I’m not a big film guy tho

The final sequence was masterful imo -- I loved the rooftop chase shot from above.

I would have kept watching, but for my gf it was mostly the unrelenting sense of dread & tension (and the violence)

just rewatched GT today and realized i'd forgotten how really shocking the violence is, had to turn away from some of it tbh. Gems is much less brutal, but the unrelenting sense of dread & tension is def there & only slightly diminished compared to GT

The plot of this movie is illogical,sometimes clise to abusurd.

*close to absurd*

Benny said in their chapo interview that they are Best Show fans and that he road-tested this character by calling the show and seeing if Tom Scharpling would buy it or not, evidently he did

the plot is definitely illogical, but so illogical throughout that I just kind of let it go. It does make for an odd contrast with the style, which has a kind of slightly warped/druggy realism to it.

Movie was ok but i didn't like that contrast. to each his own.
Uncut Gems made more sense and is a much better movie overall imo

I think it felt "real" to the extent that a druggy dirtbag night can follow odd twists and turns with no particular logic to them. Many of the particulars of the plot felt completely unbelievable however.

the specifics are over the top but the overall impression of ending up in a v bizarre place through the happenstance results of one scam leading to another is very real for a certain kind of person

yeah that captures what I was trying to get at

Most crime films are absurd to some degree

I watched this and found it very disturbing and compelling at the same time. It is well-made and felt real/gritty, from the color to the locations. I didn't know anything about the Safdie brothers but as soon as they went to Adventureland in Farmingdale and from the overhead highway shots I knew they had to be from Long Island or Queens.

The tension and stress of the entire film is incredible, but certain moments were so queasy, especially the entire scene inside the home with the young girl was disturbing.

Buddy Duress' character was so depressing but also so funny. The second they get to the security guards' apartment he has to get lit, just the same way he had to get lit the second he got out of prison. His voice just cracked me up too.

I had a hard time watching the apartment scene with the girl (I actually turned it off multiple times while trying to get through my discomfort just at the moment where he is lying his way in), and the security guard beating/dosing.

Morbs in 2017:
audience I saw it with was laughing quite a lot

Finally saw this tonight. I can imagine it being deeply uncomfortable to watch with an audience (at least in the present day). It's hard to see person after person have their fate mowed down by his needs, especially when half of them are lending him a hand. Still, amazing work.