Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford, 2016)

Discussions of specific films and franchises.
Message
Author
User avatar
mfunk9786
Under Chris' Protection
Joined: Fri May 16, 2008 4:43 pm
Location: Philadelphia, PA

Re: Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford, 2016)

#51 Post by mfunk9786 » Fri Dec 30, 2016 4:54 pm

Even though it routinely makes me want to bang my head against the wall (nothing personal), the amount of discussion going on here about this film is so heartening

User avatar
MoonlitKnight
Joined: Thu Mar 19, 2009 10:44 pm

Re: Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford, 2016)

#52 Post by MoonlitKnight » Sun Jan 01, 2017 11:50 am

... which is exactly what art should do.


User avatar
theseventhseal
Joined: Wed Dec 28, 2016 3:53 pm

Re: Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford, 2016)

#54 Post by theseventhseal » Sun Jan 15, 2017 1:46 am

warren oates wrote:In a year of great releases from all over the world, this is a top contender for the worst new feature I've seen. God, what an insufferably pretentious bore this film is -- a hollow high sheen snoozefest endlessly impressed with it's own earnestness, mistaking superficial cliched depictions of violence and ennui for actual meaning, confusing lighting with atmosphere and showcasing some of the worst directing (all around but especially in terms of the most basic staging, blocking and action direction that I've seen in a long time). Not much in this film works the way its maker seems to be intending it, makes it mean what he wishes it would or his audience feel how we're supposed to feel -- from the much discussed opening images (more Matthew Barney-lite than Lynch) to the final utterly predictable resolutions of the various storylines. The film's narrative had a certain mystery and promise in the first half hour and I kept watching on the theory that "Surely, there must be more to it than this." But, alas, there never was.

Agreed. Pretentious and a failure as a film, IMO.

It's as if it was penned by a second year NYU film students who had a flash that he could create a parallel structure to create something brilliant. PARALLEL STRUCTURE, I should say that in all caps, because that's as subtle as the screenplay is. I don't think I've ever seen a more hamfisted attempt at subtle artistry in my life. Using a PARALLEL STRUCTURE is hardly a fresh idea and it's so poorly implemented in Nocturnal Animals as to make me think it should forever be eradicated by the Directors Guild of America as a technique to prevent it happening again.

The number one failure of this film is DON'T TRY TO TELL TWO STORIES IF THEY'RE NOT BOTH EQUALLY INTERESTING. There was a fairly recent British film where a writer is investigating a historical romance found in a series of letters (name escapes me now), and that was paralleled to the writer's own burgeoning love story. Unfortunately, what happened in that film is exactly what happens in "Noctural Animals" -- half of the story is fairly intriguing while the other is dull, so one instinctively starts reaching for that fast forward button in one's mind to skip the doldrums and get back to the interesting one. And who thought mixing the banal suffering of the upper class would be worthy counterpoint to serial killers in bloody trailers among the tumbleweeds in old Tejas? Were these two wildly divergent landscapes supposed to gel in metaphor? Sorry, Tom Ford, this is the cinema, not the printed page where they might have worked in less visceral form.

I gave the film a good hour to convince me that Amy Adam's melancholy baths (and baths and showers and baths) were somehow going to be ingeniously integrated and matched by the parallel story and that the film would click at some point. However it never clicks. Adam's mundane story slowly became more and more of a roadblock to the interesting (if extremely cliched and a bit cheap) momentum of the crime story so instead of creating a sense of intrigue, all that's created was a sense restlessness.

Directorially, don't think I've ever more amateurish attempt at linking scene transitions in my life. There must have been twenty of them. Jake Gyllenhall takes a shower, cut to Adams in the shower. Adams wake up from a dream, cut Jake wakes up from a dream. OKAY WE GET IT ALREADY. Absolute overkill and lazy, lazy direction. David Lean would be rolling over in his grave. Jake Gyllenhaal, who is capable of giving a decent performance was hampered by a lousy script and every time the setup of a scene built to a big moment from him: the dialogue just went flat and Tom Ford had no idea how to wrest any real emotion from the scene. Even Michael Shannon looked like he was struggling with the flimsy material he was given.

If the film showed any real originality, I might call it a failed experiment. But as I can't even credit the film with a smidgen of originality for its amateurish PARALLEL STRUCTURE 101, and so I can only call it is a lousy, no, TWO lousy films.

User avatar
TMDaines
Joined: Wed Nov 11, 2009 1:01 pm
Location: Stretford, Manchester

Re: Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford, 2016)

#55 Post by TMDaines » Mon Jan 16, 2017 4:40 am

You do realise this wasn't an original screenplay, but an adaptation of a novel with a book within a book structure?

User avatar
movielocke
Joined: Fri Jan 18, 2008 12:44 am

Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford, 2016)

#56 Post by movielocke » Wed Jan 18, 2017 5:05 am

Pretty, austere, and fairly pointless. Gyllenhall does great work while Adams phones it in and Shannon refrains from stealing the film somehow.

It has a nice tension and pacing to individual set pieces, but the comically bad editing draws attention to itself with its flipping and flopping of the same freeway interchange and never really lets up, particularly with the book-to-Adams cuts, all nicely conceived, but so repetitive and overdone.

It's going to be hard not to hate the movie, and there are things I like in it, but not much.

Ford has a nice visual eye, but has manages to crap out two very pretty rather meh movies that for all that they are different they both fail for the same reason, direction.

And oh that world shattering ending of experiencing one of life's moderately embarrassing inconveniences, so deep. I mock, but I like the ending for positioning Susan, improbably as the "truly" weak one, whereas the Susan the film had developed until that scene would have realized what was happening and would have altered the situation. It was nice of them to change characters there for that scene so we could have our arty ending to pair with our arty opening (she's so unattractive on the inside, like the morbidly obese are on the outside. Genius!)

User avatar
domino harvey
Dot Com Dom
Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm

Re: Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford, 2016)

#57 Post by domino harvey » Tue Feb 21, 2017 11:15 pm

What an empty and stupid film, filled with meaningless grotesqueries in present and fictional worlds, with the added benefit of the novel-world being hackneyed and obvious in its Message about weakness and strength. Does Ford think he has any basis in making criticisms of anyone here in this glossy but (as warren oates points out) poorly-made collection of shot-reverse shots, familiar LA inserts, and every stereotype you could think of for each component part? As if a bad film made with the pretense of being Art wasn't enough, the Depth and Meaning get lazily bandied about as though Ford has a single thing to say that isn't either obvious or eye-rolling. I mean, a fucking bird actually flies into Amy Adams' window at a key point, foreshadowing a fictional character's blindness. Did Jake Gyllenhaal circa-flashback write this shit? Considering three of the last four title cards (overlayed on the most Trying Too Hard opening credits of all time) are Tom Ford's name, we can assume he's proud of what he's done here. I will certainly never forget or forgive him. If only he had a generic coworker who could sit down gently in front of his desk and say "You look tired, what's wrong" in a tone that reveals the asker is a helpful appliance or perhaps a clever pet but not a human being.

User avatar
TMDaines
Joined: Wed Nov 11, 2009 1:01 pm
Location: Stretford, Manchester

Re: Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford, 2016)

#58 Post by TMDaines » Wed Feb 22, 2017 3:44 am

You're entitled to not like the film, but there's a level of pot calling the kettle black when you criticise the film in that brutal and overly stylistic manner, and yet then have the cheek to accuse the director of trying too hard, while having done the same in your evisceration, no? :D

User avatar
R0lf
Joined: Tue May 19, 2009 7:25 am

Re: Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford, 2016)

#59 Post by R0lf » Wed Feb 22, 2017 6:06 pm

(A lot of Harvey's criticism of glossy movies relies on people believing that effortless lightweight candy confection and deliberate shallowness in movies is actually that effortless and isn't one of the hardest things in the world for a director to do successfully or making out that the experiments in failed experimental films are the most rote and repeated in cinema.)

I can't help but make the association when someone uses the word "grotesqueries" in this context that it's an unconscious homophobic reaction; I see this word used all the time when people are reviewing texts from a gay author where the subject (often female) is obviously just a surrogate for the gay male.

User avatar
domino harvey
Dot Com Dom
Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm

Re: Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford, 2016)

#60 Post by domino harvey » Wed Feb 22, 2017 6:08 pm

Hahaha what the fuck. Until this moment it never even occurred to me that Ford is gay, and even if I had known or considered it, it would have had zero bearing on the complete travesty of a film he foisted on the world

Do not ever accuse me or another member of homophobia for using a non-coded and perfectly applicable word if you want to remain a member here.

User avatar
FrauBlucher
Joined: Mon Jul 15, 2013 8:28 pm
Location: Greenwich Village

Re: Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford, 2016)

#61 Post by FrauBlucher » Wed Feb 22, 2017 6:30 pm

I couldn't agree more on Domino's two most recent posts.

User avatar
knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford, 2016)

#62 Post by knives » Wed Aug 23, 2017 9:10 am

I basically agree with Dom on this, but will add that Amy Adams, who I'd probably say is the best working American actress at the moment, is kind of miscast. She works well enough in the flashbacks when as Brian says she has to act childlike and immature, but in the main storyline her performance seems at odds with the character (who seems more an Amy Ryan type of character). Part of the problem is that Ford is just asking her to look at the camera in serious artist clothes for much of the storyline, but even with that it's such an unconvincing performance as a performance. To judge the film more fairly I think it would be easy to extrapolate that modern day Adams, with pretty sweater, is supposed to be a performance of the same soft woman trying to be hard (which goes with the overly expository themes). The problem is that the performance is never convincing and the high level BS detector of the environment that seems to be present would of course catch onto the weakness.

User avatar
Roscoe
Joined: Fri Nov 14, 2014 3:40 pm
Location: NYC

Re: Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford, 2016)

#63 Post by Roscoe » Wed Aug 23, 2017 9:23 am

A lot of the criticisms I'm reading of NOCTURNAL ANIMALS are exactly the criticisms I had of Ford's previous effort, the unspeakable A SINGLE MAN: pretty all over the place, not a whiff of substance. Good to know I'm not missing anything.

User avatar
knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford, 2016)

#64 Post by knives » Wed Aug 23, 2017 9:27 am

It is very pretty (I think McGarvey is the only one who figured out the sort of trashy, idiot's Lynch that they were making and made it look just right for that in a cheap '90s thriller sort of way). Also I see that Ehrlich compared this to Lee Daniels and that is probably the most accurate description possible.

User avatar
ianthemovie
Joined: Sat Apr 18, 2009 10:51 am
Location: Boston, MA
Contact:

Re: Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford, 2016)

#65 Post by ianthemovie » Wed Aug 23, 2017 8:11 pm

Count me in the "pretty but insubstantial" camp. Having seen both Nocturnal Animals and A Single Man, I'm unconvinced that Ford has anything beyond a superficial understanding of character and plot. His remarks in the audio commentary for the latter film would seem to bear this out as he makes the most banal remarks about the material. He has a good visual eye (not surprising given that he's a designer) but that's not enough to make him a great filmmaker, at least not so long as he's trying to make realistic character-driven dramas.

Since I just saw Nocturnal Animals for the first time I also have to say: how is it possible to justify that opening credits sequence? It seemed to me inexcusable and exploitative (and as someone who appreciates good exploitation it takes a lot for me to use that word disparagingly). I realize that those obese women were technically part of a performance art piece at Adams' gallery...and that she herself dismisses it as "junk"...but then what justifies Ford using these women to ends that are no less junky? It really does feel like a calculated attempt on Ford's part to be "edgy" and provocative for the sake of shock value ("Oh, they think I just make movies about pretty people, do they? I'll show 'em..."). I'm being a bit harsh but Ford has done very little thus far in his career to earn my respect for him as an artist.

User avatar
Murdoch
Joined: Sun Apr 20, 2008 11:59 pm
Location: Upstate NY

Re: Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford, 2016)

#66 Post by Murdoch » Tue Oct 10, 2017 4:12 pm

This was a strange experience, forcing together two largely disconnected halves that never make a satisfying whole. Adams's section is monotonous and uneventful, while Gyllenhaal's section is formulaic to a fault. There is something to be said about juxtaposing a tense thriller against the calm everyday encounters of an art dealer, hitting the brakes from rape and assault to shift to Adams dining with her mother. As an experiment in storytelling, I can appreciate the attempt to contrast the thrill of fiction with the dullness of life, but the form of the film is far more interesting than the substance (the central theme of which is literally written on the wall in one scene).

Gyllenhaal's scenes are swept up in sparse lighting and desert landscapes, while Adams wanders through brightly lit interiors. Gyllenhaal, Shannon and Taylor-Johnson are generic archetypes, while I'd be hard-pressed to find any defining trait of Adams and those she encounters in her section. I think this juxtaposition is due to the event that resulted in the two severing ties:
SpoilerShow
an abortion.
The monotony around Adams's plot and the anger fueling Gyllenhaal's comes from a gendered response to that event; for the former the event is a common part of life whereas for the latter it's a personal affront (so much so that his story includes his proxy wife and daughter suffering horrific tragedy). I find this duality interesting, but the way it's explored to be unremarkable. The opening credits, an attention-grabbing non sequitur, only goes to show Ford's cinematic interest in form over function. The film purposely relies on shallow plotting and to little effect. Overall, it felt very amateur and it didn't give me confidence that Ford has much to offer as a filmmaker.

Post Reply