Hacker Cinema
Jojo Rabbit
2019 · Film · 108 min
Directed by Taika Waititi
Jojo, a lonely German boy during World War II has his world shaken when he learns that his single mother is hiding a Jewish girl in their home. Influenced by a buffoonish imaginary version of Adolf Hitler, he begins to question his beliefs and confront the conflict between propaganda and his own humanity.
6 positive1 mixed5 neutralfrom 12 commenters
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14 comments on Hacker News
I dunno, 2015, I'm a little weak on this year: It Follows, Creed, Ex Machina, Max Max: Fury Road, Sicario, The Hateful 8. I'd watch those again with someone any time, and recommend all of them often. Several on my to-watch list most of which I expect to be good, like Queen of the Desert, While We're Young, Slow West, and The Overnight, just haven't made it to them yet. Not an exhaustive list, just gleaned from some titles I have at hand.
2016: Green Room, The Nice Guys, Hail Caesar!, The Neon Demon, Swiss Army Man, Hunt for the Wilder People, The VVitch, Train to Busan, Shin Godzilla, Moana (hey, I like this one), Arrival. Moonlight's on my to-watch and is supposed to be really good.
2017 (I've done OK on catching up with these!): The Lost City of Z, Dunkirk, Low Life, Good Time, Logan Lucky (absolutely slept on, kills it as a feel-good lightweight small-stakes heist movie), Blade Runner 2049, The Death of Stalin (I liked this less than a lot of folks, but given how widely-loved it was, I'm probably the idiot here), One Cut of the Dead, You Were Never Really Here. The Planet of the Apes movie from that year, plus Phantom Thread, and The Little Hours are to-watch for me and come highly recommended.
2018: Annihilation, Isle of Dogs, Upgrade, Sorry to Bother You, High Life, Eighth Grade, the Suspiria remake. To-watch that I expect to be good include Champion (Korean arm wrestling movie—there's another movie by the same name that year), First Reformed, BlacKkKLansman, The Favourite, The Wolf House, Climax, and some others.
2019: HUGE year for the particular (small) set I'm seeing on my list, including a ton to-watch but a bunch I've seen. Uncut Gems, The Lighthouse, Knives Out, Little Women, JoJo Rabbit, Ready or Not, Parasite, Midsommar, The Art of Self Defense, maybe Marriage Story (but if you've seen one Baumbach movie, you've kinda seen them all, and I'm not sure I'd put it above The Squid and the Whale). Midway's a well-above-average war movie and pairs great with Tora, Tora, Tora! as a crazy-long double feature in a really fun way. To-watch list is nuts and I really need to dedicate a month or so to filling out my watched-list for this year: First Cow, The Irishman, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Bacurau, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Farewell, The Souvenir, Blow the Man Down, The Vast of Night, Her Smell, Funan.
It basically just keeps going like that, year after year, and I've barely even tried to dredge up good movies for most of those years, the bulk of it's just stuff that's risen to my attention one way or another, and I'm terrible at keeping up with foreign film especially. I also left off some that a lot of folks would probably include, like at least one Mission Impossible (aside from MI2, I think these are all pretty good action movies, though quality varies a bit) and Avengers: Endgame which, opinion on the rest of Marvel aside (I think it's mostly kinda lazy crap? But was basically entertained for most of them regardless, so I guess I can't complain too much) was a hell of an event. Also Black Panther, which everyone loved but I was pretty meh on (I hate the entire end fight, and it's looooong)
> You MIGHT find some isolated instance where someone objects to this movie. However, they'll be in an extreme minority.
Really? Take a look at the reception of recent comparable movies - The Dictator (Larry Charles, 2012), The Interview, Jojo Rabbit. All of which, to a greater or lesser extent, have been overshadowed by controversy about their portrayal of these topics, often including claims that some movie is either promoting hateful attitudes or "trivializing" and implicitly minimizing past atrocities by the vey act of portraying them via satire and ridicule. The contrast with how The Great Dictator was received historically could hardly be any clearer!
Just a quick glance at Letterboxd....
Banshees of Inisherin
Everything Everywhere All At Once
Both Knives Out movies
Parasite
Nope (probably just in the "good" grouping, not great)
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That's, uh... just from the "popular this week" screen. And only the ones I've seen, so I know they're good. But I'm pretty sure all those are last five years, or close to it.
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Digging back to 2018 and later (we can say 2018 counts since 2023 just started, right?):
Annihilation
Sorry to Bother You
High Life
Midsommar
Uncut Gems (god it's so good)
Jojo Rabbit
The Lighthouse
The Green Knight
CODA
Spontaneous ([EDIT] It seems very dumb but wow is it a gut punch, when you start to think about what you're watching and make some connections to real life)
Red Rocket (small-scale brilliance)
RRR
Watcher
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I just realized I misread you as asking for 5 good ones from just one of the last 5 years, not 5 total from the last 5 years, but I think that gets the point across? Despite my leaving off a whole bunch that may be more taste-specific, not having watched even 1/3 of the films from that span I have good reason to believe are good, not exhaustively mining that timespan (I bet I could double the size of that list without changing how I was selecting them), and also omitting a bunch of more-popular movies that I think were at least decent.
[EDIT] Hell some years you could get to 2-3 good ones just by looking at what A24 produced that year, nothing else.
Lets see... the most recent comedy movies I've seen...
Knives Out (2019) was probably the one I enjoyed the most.
JoJo Rabbit was trying too hard IMO, but I still smiled/laughed throughout it. WW2 is kinda overdone at this point (though serious films like Downfall are worth revisiting)
Free Guy was fine? Apparently "The Suicide Squad" also counts as a comedy. I guess Deadpool and Deadpool 2 were also fine. Maybe other people are tired of comicbook / superhero movies, but really I'm personally only tired of the "Marvel Formula" (and Deadpool / The Suicide Squad strays pretty heavily from the formula). Going back a bit further is "Jumanji"...
There's a lot of flicks / comedy films out there. Nothing is quite as good as Airplane but I'd say Knives Out is on-par, maybe even better than Clue (1985).
I don't really like the "Despicable Me" series, but my nieces really wanted to watch "Minions: Rise of Gru" and I actually enjoyed that one. (My nieces love this series, so I can say that I've watched all of it and its mostly trash. But Rise of Gru actually got me to laugh)
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I'm no critic. I enjoy just a basic flick now and then. Honestly, I'd rewatch "Knives Out" more than any Adam Sandler movie from the 90s or even Austin Powers. 90s era comedy just didn't mesh well with me, despite me growing up at that time. I do have a soft spot for the dry 80s stuff with Leslie Nielsen, and I guess I really liked Jackie Chan's action/comedies through the 90s and 00s.
I dunno, if I think "90s comedy I enjoyed", I think of Men in Black or Aladdin? Nothing in the list that this author wrote.
Ok devil’s advocate. What’s more original? Thor 3: Ragnarok? Or Jojo Rabbit? Both great films imo; both by Taika Waititi.
The former features marvel’s Thor, who’s commercial af. But it goes to a new world, has a markedly different tone, humor, themes, and plot. The plot hits themes of humility and identity and the specifics of the ending were, imo, not very predictable.
Jojo rabbit is set in WWII with all original characters with some great bits, but an overall plot that’s fairly predictable.
You could easily argue it’s still Jojo rabbit, but is there anything obviously bad about how original Thor 3 is? I think no.
And there have been lots of great movies in the past year even. Everything everywhere, Last Night in Soho, massive talent, etc.
Edit: the formulaic rom coms and action movies and comedies were the bigger issue to me. A mildly novel setting, or perhaps, novel buddy cop duo, added far less interesting material than things complained about here.
Every era is an era of horrible films. That’s Sturgeon’s law for you.
Looking at the 2010s as a whole, we got to watch some amazing films.
We got great hard sci-fi like Gravity, Arrival, Ex Machina. The coming of age genre saw entries like Ladybird, Eighth Grade and Booksmart. Animation reached new heights with films like Inside Out, Spider-Man into the Spiderverse, and Kubo and the Two Strings.
We got comedies like The Artist, Grand Budapest Hotel, Death of Stalin, and Jojo Rabbit. Dramas like Moonlight, Fences, Spotlight, Parasite, Blue Jasmine.
Even in the ever-popular comic book genre, we got Logan and Joker playing at a very different level.
But also, it was the decade of the MCU. Let’s not underestimate what Disney has achieved with that — one big overarching story spanning over twenty films, bringing much deeper character development and more serious themes than what we’d gotten used to from blockbusters.
We had a mainstream satirical Hitler movie just a couple of years ago (Jojo Rabbit) in which Hitler was actually made to be amicable and silly (which arguably much more offensive), so I don't think this kind of thing is indicative of hegemonic cultural norms as a whole.
Now is it indicative of the university climate? The student generation? I don't know.
I am not particularly well informed on the Hitler Youth. Most of my knowledge on them comes from the excellent but fictional comedy film, Jojo Rabbit. But I'd still reckon the average Hitler Youth counselor was not accountable for the crimes of the Nazi regime. Definitely less so than a facebook database engineer is for facebook being shit.
> What argument can one make when the burden of proof is to show cultural regression?
First, you will need to give examples of what kind of movies you find "creative" that were done in the past and there is no current equivalent for that level of creativity.
"Jojo Rabbit", "Parasite", "Blade Runner 2049", "Coco", "Lady Bird", "Arrival", "The Nice Guys", ... that is the past 5 years with one almost missing because the pandemic. Is any of that any good for you?
What do you think that it was so creative in the past and has no comparation today?
Death of Stalin, Booksmart, Jojo Rabbit are definitely smaller independent comedies, but compare:
The Artist: $130M gross, $15M budget Knives Out: $311M gross, $40M budget Birdman: $100M gross, $18M budget Grand Budapest: $173M gross, $25M budget Midnight in Paris: $154M gross, $17M budget Superbad: $170M gross, $20M budget
All of those are in the same rough ballpark, but Superbad had 70% of its box office revenue in the US+Canada.
Compare Grand Budapest and Birdman, which only saw 40% of their takings in NA. Midnight in Paris comes in at 37%, and, as a European production, The Artist saw only 35%-ish of its revenue in NA. Even Knives Out, the most hollywood-y of the lot, came in at 53% revenue from NA.
Superbad is a Hollywood movie with Hollywood sensibilities, so it obviously performed best in the US, and it's obviously become a cultual touchstone there — but I personally only even heard about it relatively recently. All the other films performed much better elsewhere so obviously don't seem to have had as much of a cultural impact from a US-centric perspective.
Comedies have most certainly not died. They've just changed in tone.
A few highlights from the last decade — Booksmart is a very different take on the teenage buddy comedy. Jojo Rabbit and The Death of Stalin are some of the darkest black comedies I've ever watched, which would never have gotten made in the 90s. Birdman is completely surreal. The Grand Budapest Hotel is one of most joyous films to watch I know of, and The Artist is a comedic love letter to the silent era.
My favorite original movies of 2019: Parasite, 1917, Once upon a time in hollywood, midsommar, uncut gems, ford v. ferrari, the lighthouse, knives out, jojo rabbit, us, a number of shows that have shifted towards a streamed series format vs. traditional film
I think the film industry is alive and well.
I'd also say that dr. sleep only barely qualifies as a sequel if we're in the mood to complain about hollywood cliches.
I disagree. There are quite a few interesting movies out there. From 2019 alone: Uncut gems, Marriage Story, the Irishman, Us, 1917, Jojo Rabbit and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. All of those are good movies depending on the preference. In fact, they are innovative and creative. The main problem with judging now vs past, is the survivorship bias of the good movies, the bad ones are forgotten and lost.
Two of those are netflix movies - Irishman and Marriage Story, I don't see them any more synthetic than 1980's RAMBO 2-5? or God Father 2,3 etc. Movies were always based on the popularity, the difference being the better data.
> bad comic adaptations, getting their rating from wide fan base
The amount of haters and lovers might not offset each other perfectly, yet it should not matter after the hype dwindles. Besides, the top rated comic books adaptations are quite good - Joker?
Babylon Berlin was a action/erotic/murder mistery-filled series on Netflix, with english dubbing. I doubt you can get more "populist" than that. If you mean very specifically a Hollywood-made movie: why should Americans deal with this topic? It is more appropriately made by a society that had more connections to these events.
But even so, you see counter-examples, eg. Jojo Rabbit, which is about a small german town, post-WWII. "trending periods" as a topic of filmmaking changes constantly. See how in the last decade a lot of people cried out about lack of coverage on WWI, and then came "1917" or Battlefield One.