It’s a cute opening to the movie, but… it felt like an exposition dump? While pretending to be witty repartee? It was just a bit odd.

That’s some awesome… wig work.

So is this all about Tom Cruise? But doesn’t he do a lot of his own stunts?

Eep!

If there’s one thing huge audiences love, it’s a movie about making movies. I can’t think of any movie like this that has bombed, except all of them.

Yeah, it lost a lot of money. But not historically.

It’s cute and it’s amusing, but it just moves so slowly. The movie is 2h25m long, and it feels like all these scenes could have been cut. Even though they’re cute.

… oh! I’m watching the extended cut? It’s 20m longer than the proper version. Oops.

It seems pretty obvious what scenes were cut… like this one? I mean, I’m just guessing, but…

Heh heh

Heh heh

Yeah, OK, I like all the stunts and stuff — and they’re supposed to be all? mostly? practical — but the way they’re filmed, they just don’t pop like they should. I mean, most everything has been desaturated in the way movies are to match up real footage with CGI, so it’s just hard to be as enthusiastic as you’re supposed to be.

So, like, this looks 100% fake an embarrassing — but it might just be because of how it’s composited.

I dunno… The first half of this movie, I was on board, but then the last nine hours have kinda dragged? But then again, I’m watching the extended cut (which was a mistake).

Those are weird glasses. Did they CGI in the sky reflection in every shot?

These are the things you start wondering about when you’re not quite invested in the movie.

I’m totally willing to believe that the theatrical release of this was better, but I was just bored silly through large parts of this extended version.

But this movie just has a basic problem with the aesthetics. It’s supposedly a love letter to practical stunts — and there were a lot of them in this movie. But they all looked like shit! Because they were all colour graded into oblivion and composited, so even the realest stunt looked as bad as the cheapest CGI these days.

It’s like they had no confidence in the central concept of this thing but had to hedge.

Fall Guy. David Leitch. 2024. ⚃

Hey! AOL Time Warner! That was a thing.

Solondz is unable to get financing for his movies these days… but on the other hand, you have to ask yourself why we were subjecting ourselves to his movies in the first place. I need more pillows to hide behind while watching this.

Wow, weird desks. You can’t adjust the chairs?

DING DING BITING SATIRE WARNING DING DING

Well, I dunno. It’s such an aggressive movie — it’s designed to get a rise out of people. And the second part of it seems designed to be critic proof — Solondz has already made all the criticism you could make, so ha ha!

I think the only way the two parts work is that the second part tries to defuse any objections you had to the first part? And that’s just ass covering. So it’s no wonder that the featured review on imdb is:

Yeah yeah yeah right.

More confusing are the reviews by actual reviewers:

With things like:

So… that’s… bad?

That’s true.

But I dunno. I admire some of this movie, but it’s hard to make the case why anybody should subject themselves to watching this movie.

Storytelling. Todd Solondz. 2001. ⚃

Oh, right.

That’s what I want my house to look like!

Nice.

Anyway, after I watched the other Carax movies (one was good, one wasn’t), I watched a couple of the documentaries that were included on the discs, and… well, they made me less excited about watching more Carax movies?

Oh, this is the one where Levant plays that he’s portraying a Bulgarian beggar in Paris…

Or, er, non.

That’s a very pretty factory. The French even has pretty factories!

So this movie is gonna be a series of tableaux where Levant performs a role for a couple of minutes and then it’s on to the next thing? Is that like a comment on film-making?

There’s no doubt that Carax is able to get a lot of talented people on board to do this thing. Like this scene — it lasts for ten seconds, but must have been so much work to put together.

And is this biting satire? Or just kinda… eh?

BITING SATIRE

(As I’m fond of saying: “Satire” is another way of spelling “not actually funny”.)

This movie looks great, but it really feels like the impetus for making this is to see just how far he could push Denis Levant. In the previous scene, you had this gorgeous pietà scene, but with Levant in the Christ role sporting a very rigorous erection for quite a long time (I can’t show you a snap of that here, since this is a family oriented blog)… It really reads as if Carax just wants to fuck around with Levant, making him suffer?

That’s probably way off the mark, but that’s what this feels like.

It’s like the movie is saying something deep like “in life, we’re all playing roles”.

Yeah, it the sets and stuff look great, but the actual images look kinda meh:

Carax was able to sway potential investors concerned with the film’s budget by switching to digital photography, a process of which he strongly disapproves.

Digital.

I kinda wish I liked this movie, because it’s… I wants to be fun? But instead it’s kinda cringe?

I know! I’m so insightful. But it’s like the concept could work, and many of the scenes are quite interesting, but it just doesn’t work.

Holy Motors. Leos Carax. 2012. ⚁