Hacker Cinema
Manchester by the Sea
2016 · Film · 138 min
Directed by Kenneth Lonergan
After his older brother passes away, Lee Chandler is forced to return home to care for his 16-year-old nephew. There he is compelled to deal with a tragic past that separated him from his family and the community where he was born and raised.
4 positive1 negative6 neutralfrom 11 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
11 comments on Hacker News
Here is the full list of the 551 movies and TV shows being removed: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/legal/psvideocontent/
Top movies include Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, The Graduate, Moonlight, Manchester by the Sea, Room, Silver Linings Playbook, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Pan's Labyrinth.
What’s an equivalent movie in contemporary times? Not pretentious, sincere and relies on dialogue and story telling?
I kind of hated movies like Manchester By The Sea, American Sniper, Banshees of Insherin.
They all feel not so sincere to me. There’s something about them - a technique where audience exposition is deliberately toned down to such an extent that it’s just scene after scene with no soul.
This article taught me what a "creative producer" role is in Hollywood.
"The key people working directly with the creative producer are the director, who oversees the creative vision of the film, and the line producer, who oversees the budget. The creative producer is the ultimate form of middle-management who sees the whole picture with the core reason to exist being at the detail-level, focusing solely on a project as a supervisor of the creative."
The author produced hits with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and he also produced Manchester By The Sea. He explains well the impact of streaming on people like himself in the US.
I would just like to add that Netflix was able to fund a lot of projects in other, non-US film industries. A whole bunch of movies and miniseries made in India would never have been funded before Netflix and Amazon came there. I am thankful for that.
The other side of the coin.
I dunno, I watch couple hundreds movies per year for decades and still Manchester by the sea (2016) or Jagten (2012) hit me hard without any crazy plot twists.
It also helps to switch away from Hollywood, lot of great Iranian movies for instance.
I don't think there's any reason to worry... indie films are Landmark's entire (seemingly successful) business model, their theaters are located exactly where people who want to watch those movies live, and Amazon is producing award-winning independent films like Manchester by the Sea.
Turning Landmark into an AMC clone would make about as much sense as converting Whole Foods into Walmart-type stores. Which is to say, basically zero business sense.
The Post's article has more details and a link to the original source (which is behind a paywall): https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/03/26/cannes-film-festival-bans-netflix-films-from-competition-also-no-more-selfies
Sounds like the core of the issue involves "French cultural exception" which "mandates a 36-month delay between a movie’s theatrical release and streaming date."
It's not clear to me if Cannes cares about the 36-month period (I can't imagine...) as much as theatrical release. If the latter, films like Manchester by the Sea which were released in the theaters would still compete at Cannes.
Seems absurd, particularly that this is enshrined in law, but that's just me.
I really enjoyed (maybe not the best word...appreciated) the film "Manchester By the Sea" for reasons that this story reminds me of. My wife and some friends who have seen it said it was 'boring' and that 'nothing happened'. To me, the fact that 'nothing happened' was a very much the point; There was no grand character arc because for most people you just don't ever come back from an event like that. There is no major turnaround and everything is all better moment. You learn to live and maybe find some areas of your life that don't quite suck 24/7 if you can, but that may be all that's possible. I found it to be a very 'real' human story that isn't often told well.
True, it is affecting both. I was speaking also to the fact that Manchester by the Sea (e.g.) was made by Amazon. A great outcome for them is simply to break even at the theater. They then have an exclusive movie for free forever. The studios can't afford for all of their movies to break even.
>A movie designed to do well on a RT score needs to please everyone. The end result is something that tries to be bland, uninteresting, and inoffensive.
This is demonstrably untrue. Here is a link (along the left column) of the top RT movies for each year from 2014-2016:
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/top/
Sure there are some blockbusters, but there are also many excellent, interesting, engaging, even daring films like Moonlight, Hell or Highwater, Manchester by the Sea, Brooklyn, Mad Max: Fury Road, It Follows, Boyhood, Nightcrawler, and Birdman. And those are just among the top 10 scores for each year; if you expanded to movies in the 90% range of each year you'd have a large number of excellent choices.
I couldn't find a list of the top-rated RT movies for 2017, but (I think) currently the highest-rated among them is Get Out, a film specifically made to be the precise opposite of "bland, uninteresting, and inoffensive".
I submit that you simply choose to watch bad movies.
Misleading title. The war about the theatre window is still ongoing, and even advancing than declining. Netflix just got two major movies into Cannes, Amazon didn't even try with their hit Manchester by the sea. Theatre chains are already beating the drum against the Cannes directors, who are supposedly helping killing quality movies by selecting Netflix movies. Looks like Netflix won this fight, and the more publicity it gets the better for them. The parallel movie start is just good promotion for their streaming services, which generates revenue without all the high costs involved in theatres.
Amazon might rethink it's strategy also, and then the studios are really fucked because then they missed the boat.
I'm a bit surprised Amazon, as an example, has not been more disruptive to Hollywood. Take "Manchester by the Sea" - gross about $40m in box office. Amazon has chosen a traditional window approach to the film.
Now imagine, instead, the released it for 2 weeks (or whatever the requirement is for Oscar consideration) then pull it from theaters and make it available on Prime. I wonder if they would have made more than $30m on new Prime subscriptions. That to me would be more disruptive.