Oh Neon… I don’t really follow producers these days, but I’ve noticed that Neon has put out some interesting movies…
BY THE SWORD OF GREYSCULL!!! That’s a lot of co-producers.
This must be the end level of the Executive Producers game… but I guess this is what it takes to get movies made in Europe these days: 40 different companies, all contributing a few euros…
Oh, is this like science fiction? A frozen dystopia or something?
Oh, this is a musical!? The guy has been painfully autotuned — I never understand why they don’t have proper singers do the voices in musicals. It’s pretty horrible.
On the other hand, “proper singers” these days are also usually autotuned into horror.
And the tunes… it’s those horrible tuneful, but no actual tunes stuff that musicals do. That is, they just sing a random walk amongst notes that go well together, but it doesn’t actually cohere into a song.
Is the bad wig a social commentary?
I’m also already annoyed by the colour grading on this. They seem to be in an underground chamber, so they sing about only having night-blooming flowers… which makes no sense! You can have LED lights be whatever colour you want — you don’t have to have your dungeon be all blue just because it’s cold outside. Blue is more difficult than warmer colours, really.
This is really boring, but I like the “set design”.
There’s people that use autotune well, but in stuff like this — where the tunes aren’t there, and the orchestration is culled from Now That’s What I Call Public Domain Musical Orchestration IV, using autotune removes the only potential interest these “songs” have — the voice of the singer.
I like that they haven’t infodumped at the audience — but I guess the setup is so obvious that they don’t have to? (I.e., an encampment of people still surviving after 20 year after The Big Catastrophe That Killed Everybody).
But it’s still so boring! Inexplicably boring.
I think they way it’s filmed doesn’t help — it’s all far-off shots or medium shots: No close-ups. Is the director going for a “well, this is a musical, so it should kinda be like if you’re the audience in a theatre”? I mean, not consistently, but in effect…
And also all the shots symmetrical, as if the director was also prepping the movie for a 4:3 release.
It’s all so curious (including the not-real-sounding name of the director) that I’m tempted to do something I never do: Google the movie!
Well, that’s brutal.
Sounds like it’s his actual name:
Joshua Lincoln Oppenheimer (born September 23, 1974) is an American film director based in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is known for his Oscar-nominated films The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014). Oppenheimer was a 1997 Marshall Scholar[3] and a 2014 recipient of the MacArthur fellowship.
Wow, no wonder 28 institutions (at least) forked over money to allow him to make this…
Well, that’s brutal, too.
There’s a word for “horrible picture financed by all corners of Europe”… “A euro pudding”. (But not in the British sense.) This seems like one of those.
But you can’t deny that there’s some striking shots.
That’s what I feel! Except the bit about “visionary director”, because I have no idea who he is.
This could have been a two paragraph Substack article instead. We get it.
Hey, a mostly physical set!
He’s over-acting so badly as a twitchy twitchy guy…
So political!
It’s so subtle.
HE”S BEEN DISILLUSIONED! That’s disillusioned face.
Indeed. And they’re bad.
Oh, it’s going to get even worse?
Well, uh. This guy restated the central proposition of the movie as a criticism against the movie? How does Rottentomatoes pick these “critics”? “Vanyaland”?
Is it, though? The guy was using that point about the value of one’s time to dis that woman, and he was a total dick about it. (And even expressed regret later.) So, no, that’s not ironic at all; it’s just stupid.
(“Fish Jelly Films”.)
I’m not defending this movie, mind, but I’ve just never noticed how many stupid reviews there are on Rottentomatoes from venues that sound fake.
In interviews, Oppenheimer has recounted how The End started off as a documentary examining a “very wealthy, very dangerous” family who was looking to build just the kind of underground bunker that Mother and Father have constructed here. Surely that clan must be more interesting, more layered, than the one depicted here.
Probably not, though — they were probably dicks, too.
Oh wow. And I betcha this wasn’t cheap to make.
Yup:
their ambitious first fiction feature, The End, a six-country co-production with a budget of about $17m
I mean, not cheap on a European scale.
it’s also a complicated six-country co-production that needed 45 shooting days across Germany, Italy and Ireland, and took eight years to finance, plan and shoot
Yeah, typical Euro pudding fashion.
Oppenheimer knew his cast didn’t need to be professional singers – they could all hold a tune and were game for voice training. “What they’re singing is not just a kind of ecstatic expression of what they truly believe is their truth, the songs would actually be sung by fragile, vulnerable human beings in crisis. So they had to be musical in the sense that their voices had to be just right for the character – lovely enough to hold the songs, but not very polished, the way some Broadway vocalists are.”
I don’t think he’s been to Broadway? They’re usually not all that polished (except for the stars). I don’t understand why he says “could hold a tune”, because they’ve been autotuned to “perfection”, anyway.
I hope this isn’t going where I think it’s going… On the other hand, that’s such an obvious ending… that’s it’s probably going to happen.
I think that Oppenheimer probably told the composers that he wanted something like a classical musical score? But it’s not — those classical musical was chock a block with hits. Irving Berlin pumped out one banger after another. Instead they ended up with totally generic tonal phrases that don’t really go anywhere. They should have gone with Charli xcx instead.
(Bumpin’ that)
Well, at least it didn’t end the way I expected.
If I were to be fair, I’d give this movie a ⚁. Because I like the sets, and the cinematography has a certain something going on. And the performances are mostly pretty good? But it’s just an excruciatingly tedious movie.
The End. Joshua Oppenheimer. 2024.
This post is part of The Tilda Swinton Project.
