It's an interesting movie with an interesting popular reaction. Digger is currently on pace to be one of the biggest financial bombs of all time, at least Top 5, maybe Top 3. But critics like it, and it seems like the Reddit/Twitter film crowd love it.
I didn't like it. 3/10. I have two big problems with Digger:
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Even if you like the ultimate thematic payoff, the journey there isn't worth it. About 2 hours of this 2.5 hour movie is annoying cartoon people screaming at each other as ridiculous straw men of the elites. It is very much in the mode of Don't Look Up. It's occasionally amusing, but mostly annoying, and for a movie with so much dialogue, I found it all very surface level stuff about how people are (supposedly) lazy, irresponsible, and letting our planet get destroyed by (leftist) environmentalist concerns. Maybe I just don't like satire in general, it always reminds of the meme where a strawman just shouts opinions in a funny/stupid voice.
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I find the ultimate thematic thrust somewhere between muddled and banal. It seems like the ultimate point of the movie is to say that making satirical art about evil elites doesn't stop elites from being evil. Which... yes, that's true, but who doesn't know that? It seems like the movie was directed at the extremely small group of self-important pretentious people who think that Don't Look Up and Dr. Strangelove can change the course of history.
I give the film credit for its weirdness, some really good visuals, and that they spent almost $200 million on an arthouse movie, but still. Didn't like it. It's very pretentious and not as smart as it thinks it is.
Testing123
7d ago
Anyone play Blue Prince? Maybe I'm just in a Backroomsy mood, but I heard good things and it looks intriguing.
Testing123
23d ago
60+
Testing123
23d ago
Why are old people so obsessed with logistics? I'm definitely not the only person to notice this, I think it has come up in those Geico ads about "teaching people not to become their parents." I swear that every time I hang out with a parent or elder relative, they obsessively ask me about my car, my home, how I get from place to place, upkeep, roads, fuel, laundry, diets, etc. It's like the most important thing in the world is the random bullshit you have to deal with every day between the actual important things.
Also, the most old-person coded thing today is to tell someone how to get somewhere by referring to roads and landmarks instead of just saying the address amd assuming they'll use an app.
Testing123
1mo ago
Clav just posted about searching for deeper meaning in life... https://x.com/Clavicular0/status/2099036763696288248
Testing123
1mo ago
I think the consensus now is that Abagnale Jr. is a meta-fraud. Most of the exploits in the movie were made up. See his wikipedia.
Testing123
1mo ago
I was being lazy.
I just watched The Drama, an A24 movie with Robert Pattinson and Zendaya, and it’s a rare genuinely thoughtful film, one that touches on interesting ethical, relationship, judgement, and culture war issues. I want to lay out the basic idea of the movie and get some takes, but forewarning that I’ll SPOIL everything and if you’re interested in watching it, I highly recommend going in blind.
SPOILER
SPOILER
SPOILER
Testing123
2mo ago
This was really fun to read. It reminds me of a recent evolution I've had, or devolution.
When I was young and edgy, I used to say that I couldn't stand talking to most people because they were boring and weren't passionate or nerdy enough about anything, and all they wanted to talk about was the weather and logistics and other stuff I didn't care about. Then I got older and I forced myself to grow up, which meant that I chastised myself for being elitist and edgy, and I did my best to appreciate everyone and be fully engaged with conversations with anyone and anywhere. And then I recently realized that my teenage edgy self was naive and angsty but fundamentally right that most people are just boring for nerdy semi-autists like myself, and it's really annoying to have boring conversations with them.
I think your emote-judge-moralize feedback loop really is the dominant form of cognition for the vast majority of humanity.
Testing123
2mo ago
Good pull on Maika Monroe. I couldn't think of an actress who specialized in Gosling's Drive/Blade Runner aloof autist thing, but she's probably as close as it gets. I am also of the opinion that in her prime she was one of the most beautiful people on planet earth, ex. in the movie Watcher.
Testing123
2mo ago
Is this event the closest the world has ever come to a real life Camp of the Saints?
Testing123
2mo ago
Theory: kinkiness and attractiveness are inversely correlated. Attractive people mostly have sex with each other, and having sex with attractive people is very satisfying, so attractive people tend to be fine with your basic make out/oral sex/vaginal sex, and don't need anything beyond that. Uglier people don't find it very satisfying to have sex with ugly people, and their ugliness makes it harder for them to find sex at all which drives them to online porn, both of which leads them to be kinkier.
Testing123
2mo ago
You're in a rare window to have only played DS2, and I guess you're in the small but lively camp of DS2 defenders, while most consider it the black sheep of the series (though it does have its virtues and great points). For what it's worth, Elden Ring's big combat innovation was to get past to rollslop so that rolling is more strategic and timing based rather than spammy like in DS3 and Bloodborne. I highly recommend all the games, but you might like Elden Ring the best.
Testing123
2mo ago
Suggesting Dark Souls 2 over DS1, DS3, Bloodborne, or Elden Ring is so crazy and conspicuous that it might be bait. Explain yourself.
Testing123
4mo ago
Anecdata observation: being choked is an extremely common turn on for college educated, left-leaning western women. Probably as close to as popular as being spanked.
Testing123
5mo ago
A Dark Song
I've seen it and liked it a lot! A very unexpected surprise, loved the premise procedural execution of it, and the basement sequence is amazing.
I'll throw an Irish recommendation back at you - Double Blind (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14729020/). Phenomenal cinematography for such a low-budget and self-contained film.
Testing123
5mo ago
I'm 100% with you on horror trailers. The ads before Obsession and Hokum were almost all horror and I was having the same realization, plus they tend to give away way too much of the plots. If I want to see a movie due to the director, premise, or reviews, I try to avoid the trailers entirely.
I saw people bring up the Silent Hill comparisons to Hokum too, and it definitely feels like there's video game DNA in the film, though just as much Resident Evil 1 as Silent Hill. Without spoiling anything, most of the movie takes place in a single building and there's a lot of dealing with locked doors and the structure lay out (even with a map), plus there are some weird puzzle solutions that feel like video game logic.
I like Oddity too but Hokum is better. Similar odd directing styles, but much more budget in the latter to play around with. The Irish setting of Hokum (and Oddity) also gives it a nicely different atmosphere than the typical American haunted house bullshit (like the endless Conjuring knock offs).
Testing123
5mo ago
I think we're in the Second Horror Film Renaissance.
Periodically, a new movie comes out and it gets endlessly and hyperbolically glazed on Reddit, in large part due to some combination of annoying group think and botting. I think Obsession, which just came out, is one of the rare films that earns all that stuff. I think it might be one of my favorite horror films of all time. Great premise, great execution, goes in unexpected directions, probably the first time I've seen a movie where the presence of a character makes my chest feel tight throughout the whole movie. It has flaws, but it's so good that I didn't even notice them until after it was over.
Hokum came out last week. It retreads ground horror fans have seen a million times, but it has some of the best tension-building I've ever seen. If it weren't for the really annoying overabundant jump scares, it could have been great, but it's still really good, with a 40 minute stretch of near perfection in the middle.
Next week we get Passengers, which looks alright, and the week after, we get Backrooms, which is A24 and looks really damn cool.
If "Second Horror Film Renaissance" doesn't take off as a title, then either "Young Horror Renaissance" or "YouTuber Horror Renaissance" should. The director of Obsession is only 26, and the director of Backrooms is 20! Both were Youtubers, as are the Philippou brothers (Talk to Me and Bring Her Back), and Zach Creggor (Weapons and Barbarian) used to be a sketch comedy guy, which is pretty much the precursor to YouTube.
I think that's possibly an accurate description of the innerworkings of progressives, but I also think that's an excessively Culture War-brained perspective.
In Bruges isn't about whether murder or prejudice are morally permissible. At its core, the film is about guilt and the potential for redemption through a dual character study of Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson). I think the main questions the audience is supposed to struggle with is whether Ray can be redeemed and try to find happiness after living an evil life which culminated in him accidentally shooting and killing a child while shooting and killing a priest, for money.
Ray's racism and fatphobia are played for laughs and fill out his characterization. They indicate that he is gruff, prickly, generally uncaring of others, and he likely comes from a lower class background where such beliefs are normal and tolerated. The film implicitly acknowledges that Ray's prejudices are morally wrong while also casting them as very minor sins against his more serious crimes. A small part of his redemption arc is apologizing to a dwarf who he carelessly insulted earlier in the film.
Or to put it in your terms, pricing Ray's history of murder and penchant for racism is the point of the film. The viewer (and Ray for that matter) are trying to price them in relation to his potential for redemption.
What my prior post was mocking is the idea than a modern culturally left-leaning American finds it more difficult to sympathize with someone who makes casually racist statements for fun than someone who kills people for money and murdered a child. Both of those factors are presented as flaws in Ray's character in the movie, but the film clearly intends for the latter to be much worse than the former, as I think any ethically sane person would. The podcast hosts inverted their moral focuses because they, IMO, have broken progressive values that raise the evilness of bigotry to the stratosphere. Basically, they have terrible pricing models for rating the evilness of actions.
And I get that if I actually sat down with the hosts of Unspooled and asked them, "do you think that saying 'nigger' is worse than murdering a child?" they would come to the same conclusion as me, but that only further highlights how far their progressive values take them from ethnical reality.
EDIT - Also, the idea that being against racism against fat black women is taking a stand in the modern culture is extremely culture war brained and kind of nuts. Vanishingly few people in the US are anti-fat black women qua fat black women, and the few that are have no political power and don't listen to podcasts co-hosted by the head film critic at the Los Angeles Times. If the hosts talked about In Bruges in this way to signal their contemporary cultural war position, then that is a sad condemnation of their world views and I wished they would just get back to understanding the film on its own terms (which, to their credit, they eventually do).
Testing123
5mo ago
I remember listening to a podcast where two (older, white, liberal) hosts were talking about the movie, In Bruges, and they both discussed how the movie can be tough to watch these days because the protagonist, who is supposed to be likeable and sympathetic, says a bunch of racist, fatphobic, and retardphobic (?) things. And then one of the hosts had a moment of clarity and verbalized that the protagonist is also a literal hitman who murdered a child, which is substantially morally worse than making a joke about fat black women.
Testing123
7mo ago
Have to disagree, since my dad had VHS copies of Revenge of the Nerds, Porky's, and Earth Girls are Easy. I was not allowed to watch.
Ah, fair enough, but I'll nitpick to say that American Pie was a resurgence of the trend, and it definitely increased the gross out angle of it. Totally agree that internet porn put a big dent in the appeal of this stuff.
Also, Horror as a Genre is still plugging along extremely well, which mildly surprises me, since imo the genre hasn't had much originality to offer for decades.
I'm surprised you think this, I think we've been in a horror renaissance since the mid 2010s and really kicking off with Hereditary (2018). Since then, we've had other Ari Aster movies, Jordan Peele, Robert Eggars, the Philippou Brothers, Zach Creggor, Osgood Perkins (more mixed), Empty Man, Smile (at least Smile 2), Together, etc. To me, this stuff is waaaaay better than almost all pre 2010 horror movie, except some of the true classics like Exorcist or the Shining.
Testing123
7mo ago
I think that's mostly explained by the normal ebb and flow of comedy trends. The vulgar teen coming of age sex comedy era was basically 1999 (American Pie) to Superbad (2007), with Road Trip and Van Wilder and a bunch of others inbetween (I don't think 21 Jump Street counts, too meta), maybe with Project X as a limping capstone (2012).
But I also can't think of the defining comedy trend of the 2010s. I asked AI what the biggest comedies of the 2010s were, and it said: Deadpool 2 (2018): $785.8 million Deadpool (2016): $782.8 million Men in Black 3 (2012): $654.2 million Ted (2012): $549.3 million — the decade's biggest "pure" live-action comedy The Hangover Part II (2011): $586.7 million 22 Jump Street (2014): $331.3 million (It also noted Bridesmaids for cultural importance, which is true, but also vaguely fits into coming age but from the other gender).
What's the trend of those movies? Sequels and IP I guess. The better and boringer answer for "what was the comedy trend for Gen Z" is just Marvel movies, or rather, a sanded-down, repeated ad nauseum derivative of Joss Whedon comedy.
Or maybe Marvel is still the late millenial trend, and the real gen Z trend is that they don't care about comedy movies at all, and their comedy world is memes and streaming and nonsense like "6-7."
Testing123
7mo ago
The explanations I've heard for the decline of comedies:
- Foreign box office is much more important now than in the past (especially China) and it's hard to do cross-cultural humor.
- Comedy movies used to make more money in the VHS/DVD phase than in theaters (often 2-5X as much), but now that whole sector is basically dead, streaming isn't as dependent on marginal movie value.
- In the olden days, movies were the best way for a comedian to get their content out. Now we have many more televised specials, YouTube, podcasts, Twitter, etc., all of which are far lower cost and less risky than a comedy movie.
- As you say, tv comedies are still alive and well, and pumped out at a faster rate than ever in the streaming era. It's still easy for Shane Gillis to make a little Netflix show like Tires, but if he was around in the late 1990s, he would have been paid $10 million for a $40 million budget movie.
- And yeah, the genre bending of modern blockbusters seemed to have consumed much of the desire for movie comedies. Even the action-comedies like Men in Black or Beverly Hills Cop seem to have fallen off.
Testing123
7mo ago
Great write up. I'd explain the decline in action movie quality to the complex dynamics of genre filmmaking as a whole: pure action movies, rom-coms, and comedies used to be huge at the box office, attract big stars, and attract big budgets, but over the last 15ish years, all three genres have been demoted almost entirely to low-tier streaming fair. Action, romance, and comedy still exist on film, but on the biggest budgets they are packaged in super hero films and cross-genre blockbusters. In 1994, you could get Nick Cage and Ed Harris and Sean Connery to work together on a $100 million blockbuster like the Rock, now you can only get that money for a Marvel movie where the actual action is a secondary concern (at best). Meanwhile, pure action movies are left to Jason Statham, rom-coms are pumped out on Netflix, and comedies are almost dead entirely.
Wouldn't this thematic angle work much better if Fossil Fools actually was good? If the (in our real world) audience was watching Fossil Fools and laughing at all the jokes and enjoying the satire, then the twist would be a thematic sucker punch. But with Digger, we spend two hours watching something annoying and dumb and then the twist is that it's annoying and dumb on purpose.
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