In the genre of 'Misery Porn', file Sorry We Missed You under 'Amateur'.
Ken Loach presents us (yet again) with struggling middle class members knee deep in their own shit and subsequently derives sadistic pleasure in slowly adding more and more shit until they all suffocate in their blue collar despair. The end.
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@saint-pauly "Middle class is people who are not in poverty". You have some real problems with definitions and concepts
I wanted to like this so badly, but I couldn't quite get there. I have to stop going into movies with high expectations. I was waiting to be blown away but Nomadland is just not a good movie.
Were the characters interesting, the lack of plot could be justified. But I wasn't invested with Fern’s journey at all. She is abrasive with zero personality. Chloé Zhao has nothing interesting to say about the reality she portrays. That’s why most of the movie is just long shot of van driving with the same dramatic piano playing. It’s basically a cycle of Fern chatting, being outcast, and traveling while she displays the exact same expression. There's no character study. Not to come off as someone lacking empathy but I simply couldn’t care less about people in this movie. Thus I found the topic of Nomadland to be incredibly purposeless. It's because of the way Americans talk about themselves. Like, “even the poor in America are much better off then the average person in most other countries around the world.” So, does that mean Americans can't be poor? Then how the hell am I supposed to feel sorry for Fern?!
Since the film dances around questions of economic struggle, we are left with the familiar tired message of most indie movies - ~leave all your possessions behind to be fReEeE, connect with nature~. For some reason, the poor are more “close to Earth” than other people and their hardship is just part of their spiritual journey to self enlightenment. And of course, there's no threats living that lifestyle, everyone is so nice. One would think the poor fight the poor for survival, so I expected people around those parts to be dangerous but no, it seems like the nomads community is just super nice.
The movie is so superficial. For Chloé Zhao it’s totally enough to showcase what it's like to live in poverty by letting some poor people speak for a couple of minutes. She never explores why they are in these situations or the societal factors that put them there in the first place. The book Nomadland is based on is very critical of Amazon's labor practices, so it is very weird to see people defending the depiction of Amazon in the film, which is not as 'apolitical' as the movie and Chloé Zhao are acting like it is. Fern always finds jobs but we never see her spending any money and yet somehow she has not enough to fix her van. How does that make sense? Maybe it was explained later in the movie (because I didn’t finish watching it)?
This movie is a whole lot of nothing. No story, character development, action or climax. The cinematography was nice every once in a while but not Oscar-worthy in the slightest. There's a reason the term Oscar Bait exists. These types of films are incredibly successful because they are an American liberal’s dream. And Nomadland is just the typical ~artistic portrait of poverty as a beautiful struggle devoid of any real political messaging~ Hollywood movie. I really can’t understand why people are parsing the film’s lack of anger toward capitalism. The movie is very neutral. I guess it was made for the same people who were acting as if they beat fascism buy electing a president who says how “nothing would fundamentally change.” The meager crumbs Americans float as "progress".
One last thing, having Frances McDormand and David Strathairn acting among people playing fictionalised versions of themselves is jarring. I don’t understand the ‘woke police’. Had McDormand’s characters be trans, Twitter would have been on fire. So, it’s okay to pretend you’re poor but not trans? The ‘woke’ people are shockingly selective of their outrage and it’s an issue I have with this era of ‘woke activism’.
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@cutecruel I agree with absolutely everything, your analysis blew me out of water.
(I swear I posted my comment on the film before I read yours, I was shocked to see that we share even some vocabulary!)
Once you embrace the cynicism and ignore your neverending anger about Hollywood's zombie-like state, which is dead, but not quite, which nowadays cannot produce anything but unworthy remakes of classic films, the film is quite enjoyable. If you're a fan of the series of course.
But, I don't understand what did the commentators expect; not a single sequel of 70s/80s/90s classic is comparable to an original, they as a standalone pieces can't be even considered good, that's why you have to evaluate things in context, and the context is that this film, and many others like it, were not made for art's sake, for glory of the creation, were not made out of ingeniousness of an author, out of a unique idea - they were made rutinely, industrially, on a Ford's assembly line, without a pretence of anything else but for (more or less mindless) entertainment that makes your minutes and hours go by, and most importantly, because big heads concluded this model of filmmaking is the most profitable.
You know it, filmmakers know it.Still, I feel that there's enough good philosophical and social ideas displayed, (some obvious, but some hidden, like the dialectics, evolution of Smith and Morpheus, evolved and more complex class struggle when it comes to humans and robots, capitalist incorporation of its critique, like the reality becoming just another simulation, and most importantly, true belief in positive social change), and that Lana Wachowski has more, but is restrained by powers that be for exactly described reasons.
Visually I wasn't impressed, also I was expecting a bit more from the "sci" part of sci-fi, first part of the film is too slow, and the second part is too fast, but it's hardly embarrassing like some make it
Face it people, Hollywood is finito. Nowadays, there is hardly a new film truly worth watching that isn't an art film. Your self-righteous wrath won't get you anywhere, you should've learned this by now (I did with the X-Files remake), and it certainly won't make you a better person if you bitch about it more than the next guy. If you look for deeper meanings of this world, then leave entertainment media, and go read some books (preferably not belletristica or poetry, those are for suckers).
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@jordyep I don't know where in my comment did you think I wrote that we should lower our standards. I literally wrote that mainstream Hollywood films aren't worth watching anymore. Besides, what does "giving a mediocrity a pass" means? Like me or you have some kind of influence on what do they make?
I had low expectations of Resurrections, and those were partially fullfilled. If my mark confuses you, don't let it, it just means I had fun watching it.
I could be brutally killing this film like the rest, dissecting its flaws like there's no tomorrow, but I decided not to, because there's no point analysing the consequences when I can analyse the causes, and my comment is quite clear in doing that. As I said, self-righteous wrath and bitching about doesn't do much, especially when you knew what you were getting into.
