I saw this last night as well and have been thinking about it all day, and yeah the music was incredible, Charles Ives x Spielberg is the perfect descriptor. I feel like a lot of the criticism that is coming its way –that it's PTA lite, that its view of zionism is kind of weird and muddled, that it's sort of insane for a gentile to make a movie where being a holocaust survivor is basically a metaphor for how tough it is to be an artist (they subtitled "shiksa," lol) – all that is valid I suppose, but it has plunged me into such an invigorating, complex thought-world, has me wanting to read Roth and Naipaul and so forth, and has so many indelible images and performances that I find it hard to really care.
I really am not sure what I think of the ending. At first I resented it for spelling out the point of the movie but now I can't decide whether we're meant to take it at face value or as just another example of someone taking what they want to take from his work instead of letting Toth speak for himself. Anyway, good writeup.
The quibbles make sense, particularly the treatment of Zionism—those moments, and the end, are where I was most conscious that Brady Corbet isn’t Jewish. It’s a young man’s big movie, in some ways more like PTA’s Magnolia than the film it most closely resembles, There Will Be Blood. But I shall not soon forget its world; for me it’s a dream that lingers.
I saw this last night as well and have been thinking about it all day, and yeah the music was incredible, Charles Ives x Spielberg is the perfect descriptor. I feel like a lot of the criticism that is coming its way –that it's PTA lite, that its view of zionism is kind of weird and muddled, that it's sort of insane for a gentile to make a movie where being a holocaust survivor is basically a metaphor for how tough it is to be an artist (they subtitled "shiksa," lol) – all that is valid I suppose, but it has plunged me into such an invigorating, complex thought-world, has me wanting to read Roth and Naipaul and so forth, and has so many indelible images and performances that I find it hard to really care.
I really am not sure what I think of the ending. At first I resented it for spelling out the point of the movie but now I can't decide whether we're meant to take it at face value or as just another example of someone taking what they want to take from his work instead of letting Toth speak for himself. Anyway, good writeup.
The quibbles make sense, particularly the treatment of Zionism—those moments, and the end, are where I was most conscious that Brady Corbet isn’t Jewish. It’s a young man’s big movie, in some ways more like PTA’s Magnolia than the film it most closely resembles, There Will Be Blood. But I shall not soon forget its world; for me it’s a dream that lingers.