Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

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domino harvey
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Re: Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

#26 Post by domino harvey » Thu Sep 16, 2021 11:15 pm

black&huge wrote:
Thu Sep 16, 2021 11:10 pm
I also had no idea David Straithairn was still alive.
He just starred in the most recent Best Picture winner, so he’s been around

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Re: Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

#27 Post by mfunk9786 » Fri Sep 17, 2021 12:27 pm

DarkImbecile wrote:
Thu Sep 16, 2021 6:48 pm
Trailer
I like GDT as a public figure and occasionally as a filmmaker - but I can never get past the Burton-esque way his films never appear to have anything in the way of real stakes for any characters depicted on screen. I know this is supposed to look... frightening(?)... but it doesn't. It's just a lot of 'creepy' set decoration and color timing. His sleek pictures would have so much more to offer if they had a port to plug your own imagination into, but again it just appears that it's entirely del Toro's imagination we're being invited to take a two hour+ look at. Certainly one of the better candidates to offer such a thing up, but cold and distant in my view.

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senseabove
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Re: Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

#28 Post by senseabove » Fri Sep 17, 2021 1:32 pm

Different side of the same coin, but for me it's the sense of him shouting "look at this SYMBOLISM!!" Not only is there no room for the viewer's imagination, there's no room for their intelligence either, as if one critic misunderstood something once long ago and ever since he's been at pains to make sure that never, ever happens again. I know the teaser's not the movie, but I'm not holding my breath that it'll be much more subtle than the teaser's

MAN or BEAST?!?!

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Re: Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

#29 Post by MichaelB » Fri Sep 17, 2021 1:36 pm

But surely that’s squarely in line with the tone of the source novel, and the language of the carnival barker?

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Re: Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

#30 Post by beamish14 » Fri Sep 17, 2021 1:44 pm

mfunk9786 wrote:
Fri Sep 17, 2021 12:27 pm
DarkImbecile wrote:
Thu Sep 16, 2021 6:48 pm
Trailer
I like GDT as a public figure and occasionally as a filmmaker

I'm mostly in the same boat, although he's very arrogant with regards to how literary properties were handled by other filmmakers-he really lambasted George Roy Hill's adaptation of Slaughterhouse-Five and claimed that his proposed remake (which has stalled, gott sei dank), would be more "true" to Vonnegut's work. He said the same thing about Nic Roeg's The Witches, and based on the reviews of the film he and Zemeckis made, they failed miserably.

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Re: Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

#31 Post by MichaelB » Fri Sep 17, 2021 1:45 pm

Although there's every chance that Nightmare Alley will be considerably truer to the source novel, given how much of it was completely unfilmable back in 1947. We shall see.

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senseabove
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Re: Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

#32 Post by senseabove » Fri Sep 17, 2021 2:44 pm

MichaelB wrote:
Fri Sep 17, 2021 1:36 pm
But surely that’s squarely in line with the tone of the source novel, and the language of the carnival barker?
I mean, sure, to an extent, but you can feature a carnival barker while still having more subtlety than a carnival barker.

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domino harvey
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Re: Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

#33 Post by domino harvey » Fri Sep 17, 2021 2:58 pm

The carnival barker is being highlighted because based on this trailer they're (falsely) trying to sell this as the new supernatural movie from GDT and saying he's half man half beast gives a certain impression

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senseabove
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Re: Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

#34 Post by senseabove » Fri Sep 17, 2021 3:13 pm

Okay sure, but also that VF puff piece I posted a quote from above literally opens with "this movie is not supernatural horror" and GDT saying sometimes people have the wrong expectations for his movie.

And also this just happened to show up in my FB feed immediately after my last post, in case anyone has any doubt about GDT's expectations for his audience: Image

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Re: Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

#35 Post by MichaelB » Fri Sep 17, 2021 3:29 pm

domino harvey wrote:
Fri Sep 17, 2021 2:58 pm
The carnival barker is being highlighted because based on this trailer they're (falsely) trying to sell this as the new supernatural movie from GDT and saying he's half man half beast gives a certain impression
But it's also an impression that's absolutely true to the source, so...

(And surely a blatantly hucksterish trailer is even more true to it?)

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domino harvey
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Re: Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

#36 Post by domino harvey » Fri Sep 17, 2021 3:37 pm

MichaelB wrote:
Fri Sep 17, 2021 3:29 pm
domino harvey wrote:
Fri Sep 17, 2021 2:58 pm
The carnival barker is being highlighted because based on this trailer they're (falsely) trying to sell this as the new supernatural movie from GDT and saying he's half man half beast gives a certain impression
But it's also an impression that's absolutely true to the source, so...

(And surely a blatantly hucksterish trailer is even more true to it?)
There's a werewolf in the source novel? This is the studio trying to pretend this is something it's not in order to sell tickets... which yes, I get, and I'm fine with it. I'm not even criticizing this approach, studios do this all the time. They're not dumb. They know audiences want something from GDT that he may not be giving them here. Some will be happy with a noir set against spiritualists and geek shows. Some will not.

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Re: Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

#37 Post by MichaelB » Sat Sep 18, 2021 2:27 am

“Is he man or is he beast?” is a direct quote from the carnival barker’s spiel in the novel. Simplified here, but the essence is there.

So I’m really not sure what point you’re trying to make here.

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Re: Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

#38 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Oct 10, 2021 3:18 am

Alexandre Desplat will no longer compose the score, and is being replaced by Nathan Johnson (Rian's brother)

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Matt
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Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

#39 Post by Matt » Wed Dec 22, 2021 11:24 pm

Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, a 64-year-old film re-released in 4 theaters this past Friday, had a higher per-screen box office average on its opening day ($580) than Nightmare Alley ($557), which opened on 2,145 screens the same day. That was Nightmare Alley’s best day.

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Re: Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

#40 Post by knives » Wed Dec 22, 2021 11:42 pm

Of course there’s also the factor of supply and demand skewing those numbers to consider. 4 screens is drastically less supply and we seen this pretty regularly. Look at the records for per screen average and it’s all for smaller releases.

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Re: Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

#41 Post by soundchaser » Thu Dec 23, 2021 12:22 am

Still, with a budget of $60 million and an opening weekend of less than a twentieth of that, it’s hard not to see this ending up on those biggest box office bombs lists.

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Brian C
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Re: Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

#42 Post by Brian C » Thu Dec 23, 2021 12:32 am

Yeah, there's no way to spin $557 per screen as anything other than pitiful.

Although $580 per screen on 4 screens also seems hardly worth the effort.

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Re: Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

#43 Post by MichaelB » Thu Dec 23, 2021 6:00 am

Well, that’s better than Danny Dyer’s Pimp, which made roughly that much in total during its first and inexplicably only week on release.

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Re: Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

#44 Post by Red Screamer » Thu Dec 23, 2021 4:04 pm

I just commented on the slickness of the original film in its dedicated thread and the remake is predictably a worse offender. Del Toro shows off his technical skill at times but for the most part it’s overproduced, overlit, and underdirected, reminding me of a mediocre HBO show. He falters most with the slack pacing and his uneven direction of actors which makes the film a slog despite its trappings in genre and camp. The most telling difference between the versions comes in the script, which takes unwelcome precedence here. Some of its expansions make sense—particularly the difference in the world of the film between mind readers and mediums, which is laid out clearly from the start rather than thrown in towards the end as it is in the previous version—but most of them are pointless, from Freudian symbolism and psychological backstory to explaining away ambiguities. Weaknesses in the 1947 script end up emphasized, mostly gaps in narrative or jumps in tone, and the three main women in the film are given more stereotypical roles to play and less to do.

The most puzzling change is the character of Cooper’s protagonist, who comes off like an ingenue in the film’s first section then after a Two Years Later chyron he’s suddenly a greedy hustler, and from then on moves back and forth between extremes. (The shot where that chyron appears also irked me: they’ve been refining their performance for two years but Rooney Mara still doesn’t know the code?) I like Cooper as an actor but his performance here is not so hot, especially compared to the subtleties of Tyrone Power’s manipulative seducer in the original. The differences in how they handle the line
SpoilerShow
“Mister, I was born for it” is the worst example but basically says it all: Power is matter-of-fact desperate, responding after a moment’s hesitation; Cooper spends 20 seconds breaking down into tears which slowly turn into disturbed laughter before he delivers the the line with a broad, knowing irony.

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Re: Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

#45 Post by Brian C » Fri Dec 24, 2021 7:24 pm

I actually thought the spoiler part was an improvement in the new film.

That aside, though, I thought this was a slog. Perhaps I did both myself and GDT's film by watching them both within a few days' time. But where I thought the 1947 version was flawed but still a fun watch, this one just strips all the fun away without offering much to compensate. This film is interminable and dour and honestly, it was a struggle to find any reason why an audience would be expected to enjoy it at all, especially after the first act set in the carnival. mfunk's earlier prediction about it being "cold and distant" couldn't have been more accurate if Zeena had read it from tarot cards.

I haven't read the novel but given all of MichaelB's talk earlier in the thread about how much the original film had to modify the material, it's really surprising to me how much of the new film simply follows the previous one. The changes here are mostly minor and entirely inconsequential, and certainly give no impression that the source is all that different - it's pretty much a straightforward remake of the 1947 and not a re-adaptation of the novel, or at least that's how it comes across to me.

What GDT does instead is just MORE. For example, the original obviously couldn't show a man bite off the head of a live chicken, but you can bet Del Toro will seize the chance literally the first chance he gets! Along the same lines, the bad characters here are MORE bad, the violence is MORE violent, the grotesque is MORE grotesque. The original felt overly schematic to me, but Power's take on the Carlisle character as an overly ambitious sociopath at least made sense; Cooper and Delt Toro turn him into an outright psychopath. Yet for all the embellishment, Del Toro still manages to make Mara's Molly even less substantial that she was in the former film (Mara's badly miscast anyway).

And finally, I don't want to single this movie out because it's practically an industry-wide phenomenon at this point, but I'm really tired of every movie looking so digital these days. This movie had to have been shot almost entirely on real sets - if it wasn't, there's no good reason why - but even scenes set in, say, Lilith's office look like they've been shot green-screen and endlessly manipulated. What I wouldn't give for some natural-looking photography in a movie these days.

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Re: Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

#46 Post by domino harvey » Sun Dec 26, 2021 4:04 pm

GDT has created a black and white version, though given the box office, it’s surely to be relegated to the Blu-ray not a theatrical run

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Re: Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

#47 Post by The Elegant Dandy Fop » Sun Dec 26, 2021 4:14 pm

It actually has a two-night run on 35mm at the New Beverly next month. Not a theatrical run exactly, but it will probably make the rounds at art house theaters or cinematheques.

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Re: Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

#48 Post by DarkImbecile » Sat Jan 01, 2022 2:34 am

Brian C wrote:
Fri Dec 24, 2021 7:24 pm
...I thought this was a slog. Perhaps I did both myself and GDT's film by watching them both within a few days' time. But where I thought the 1947 version was flawed but still a fun watch, this one just strips all the fun away without offering much to compensate. This film is interminable and dour and honestly, it was a struggle to find any reason why an audience would be expected to enjoy it at all, especially after the first act set in the carnival. mfunk's earlier prediction about it being "cold and distant" couldn't have been more accurate if Zeena had read it from tarot cards.

I haven't read the novel but given all of MichaelB's talk earlier in the thread about how much the original film had to modify the material, it's really surprising to me how much of the new film simply follows the previous one. The changes here are mostly minor and entirely inconsequential, and certainly give no impression that the source is all that different - it's pretty much a straightforward remake of the 1947 and not a re-adaptation of the novel, or at least that's how it comes across to me.

What GDT does instead is just MORE. For example, the original obviously couldn't show a man bite off the head of a live chicken, but you can bet Del Toro will seize the chance literally the first chance he gets! Along the same lines, the bad characters here are MORE bad, the violence is MORE violent, the grotesque is MORE grotesque.
Maybe this was a result of expectations set by others' reactions, but I was shocked to realize that of the two December 2021 period pieces prominently featuring Bradley Cooper, this was the one I enjoyed more, and by a pretty solid margin!

Far from feeling like a respectable slog (which is more how I'd characterize the original), Del Toro's remake felt fine-tuned and focused, managing to be his most mature and disciplined film while still incorporating his signature aesthetic inclinations. Brian's not entirely off the mark in describing Del Toro's approach as MORE, but the elevated ugliness in the characters and their actions never felt like excess for its own sake but instead reflected a more complete embrace of the themes of ambition and deception and the rot they hide. The narrative's nastiness is quite effectively counterbalanced by the lush and intricate production design, an unobtrusive but excellent piano-driven score, and some of the best compositions of Del Toro's career.
Brian C wrote:
Fri Dec 24, 2021 7:24 pm
The original felt overly schematic to me, but Power's take on the Carlisle character as an overly ambitious sociopath at least made sense; Cooper and Del Toro turn him into an outright psychopath.
This feels off to me by a degree of extremity in each case: where Power comes across as a mere asshole who stumbles almost blindly into his ruination and for whom the 1947 version feels compelled to attempt to manufacture sympathy, Cooper's version of Carlisle is more interesting because he actually is an ambitious sociopath who actively makes the choices that drive his downfall, all the while deluding himself as effectively as one of his marks as to his own true nature. Del Toro and Cooper flesh out Carlisle's corrosive sense of entitlement and callous willingness to use and exploit those around him, and effectively maintain Carlisle's seeming surprise at the new amoral depths he's willing to wade through at every stage until his final scene, when he finally acknowledges who he really is.

It's a shame that this will likely be known in the short-term more for bombing at the box office than for meeting it's early award season expectations, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if appreciation for Del Toro's Nightmare Alley grows — both relative to the rest of his filmography and as an increasingly rare example of high-quality studio filmmaking.

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Re: Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

#49 Post by Never Cursed » Tue Jan 18, 2022 6:22 pm

Despite being made by the remnants of Fox, this is coming to HBO Max February 1, for those who want to see this but don't necessarily want to go to a theater now

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Re: Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

#50 Post by The Fanciful Norwegian » Tue Jan 18, 2022 7:33 pm

Never Cursed wrote:
Tue Jan 18, 2022 6:22 pm
Despite being made by the remnants of Fox, this is coming to HBO Max February 1, for those who want to see this but don't necessarily want to go to a theater now
It'll be on Hulu too. Fox and HBO signed a new ten-year output deal in 2012, way before the buyout; Disney got it amended last year so about half of the remaining films under the deal will be on both HBO Max and Disney+/Hulu at the same time. They haven't said which films those are, so no idea if, for example, The French Dispatch will be exclusive to HBO Max or a simultaneous release on Hulu.
Last edited by The Fanciful Norwegian on Tue Jan 18, 2022 7:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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