Hacker Cinema
Midsommar
2019 · Film · 147 min
Directed by Ari Aster
Several friends travel to Sweden to study as anthropologists a summer festival that is held every ninety years in the remote hometown of one of them. What begins as a dream vacation in a place where the sun never sets, gradually turns into a dark nightmare as the mysterious inhabitants invite them to participate in their disturbing festive activities.
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21 comments on Hacker News
As disturbing as the film "Midsommar" was, I found the concept of a human life being divided into 4 seasons of 18 years each pretty compelling. Not necessarily that life should end after Winter, but a person's contributions to society probably should. Having politicians in office pushing 80 is a disgrace.
The 90s films mentioned in this post are works of art and the actors and creators were artists. Compensation sustains the art, but it’s not the primary purpose.
Netflix is a business. The content on Netflix is largely designed or purchased with a primary goal of engaging paying users.
We can find plenty of films that are works of art after the 90s. One Battle After Another is a recent one that comes to mind. Parasite, No Country for Old Men, Arrival, Moonlight, Tree of Life, Midsommar, Mandy…
>If you like experimental movies and/or are you’re into filmmaking, go for >90% critic and 65-85% audience for gems. If you’re not, you will HATE these movies.
Just checked some random “weird arthouse” movies I liked, mostly horror genre. It holds up pretty well. And I wouldn't in a million years recommend these movies to anyone that I didn't already know liked "these types" of movies.
The Blackcoat's Daughter: Critic 77%, Audience 52%
Possessor: Critic 94%, Audience 59%
The Lighthouse: Critic 90%, Audience 72%
The Killing of a Sacred Deer: Critic 79%, Audience 63%
A Ghost Story: Critic 91%, Audience 67%
Midsommar: Critic 83%, Audience 63%
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)
It's fun watching Marvel's catalogue from start to current. They really went all-in early on, then the mode-du-jour changed and it's almost obvious how hard they avoid it (a lot of red and green lights for example). Interfaces, weaponry and engines are always egregious in that franchise.
I remember Midsommar being another particularly bad example - the entire apartment set in the opening scenes is dressed in orange/teal. Down to book spines, vases and light fittings.
It's interesting to see films that don't use strong grading at all. I think Star Wars wasn't too bad here because the whole visual language was set up in the 70s and everything now tries to reflect it (lots of primaries in control panels because those were the lamps they could use back then). They do have "planet" grades but it's not too bad.
The Ninth Gate (Roman Polanski), which I have seen perhaps 5 times. I think it is the hidden meaning in old books which draws me to this movie. Videodrome (David Cronenberg) and recently Midsommar (Ari Aster) plus many of the already mentioned.
The role singing and especially the festival plays here was very foreign to me when i moved to estonia. I have to admit I was initially reminded of the movie midsommar when seeing 100 000 people wearing traditional clothing and sing “mu isamaa on minu arm”, many with tears in their eyes. The only way to understand this is to look at the context:
- estonia is one of the least religious countries in the world, the independence day and song festival take an important role that is filled by more religious holidays in other countries, i would say both come even before new years and Christmas for many
- estonia is a tiny country with less than 1 million estonian speakers. the importance of culture and heritage preservation is really high especially in lights of russias argumentation in ukraine. the song festival is maybe the most vividly lived example of this
- the singing revolution cemented the role of singing even further in national identity
- last and most importantly more than 130 000 estonians were killed or deported under soviet occupation and estonian identity was threatened to be wiped out. the song festival is a symbol for overcoming oppression and remembering the lost ones.
I’m on the ground floor, and through my bedroom window I can see the top of a tree about 300 meters away. Sometimes I zone out looking at it when I’m falling asleep, and I discovered I can give myself a brief thrill of vertigo by imagining it’s below me instead of over there.
It struck me that fear of heights is just fear of distance in the direction of gravity, and how much this baked-in sense of the pull of gravity shapes our perception of the world. It’s obviously a Darwinian survival thing that many animals feel, but some animals (birds, sea creatures… astronauts?) must experience it differently. For the rest of us who do have fear of heights, I think that directional pull has a large impact on how we see the world.
I think this is also why upside-down camera shots in some movies can be so effective in conveying unease (like the entrance to the village in Midsommar), but if they had chosen to show the scene sideways would just feel like a mistake.
One last only sorta-related thought: I used to entertain myself in school or waiting at the airport or whatever by imagining how I’d navigate the space if gravity “turned sideways”, and I wonder how many other people have done that.
There's also Midsommar as a recent example of a very day-time movie with lots of outdoors artificial lighting
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.
For folks who don't want to click, the argument is Indiana Jones didn't have an impact on the outcome of the story; the Nazis still would have found the arc and died in the end.
It's an amusing idea, but I've always thought it was weird to call it a problem with the movie, as it would apply to the protagonist in a bunch of movies (spoilers abound in this extremely random assortment of movies off the top of my head):
* If Kurt Russel's character hadn't been in The Thing, everything that happened still would have happened
* If Harry and Sally hadn't been in When Harry Met Sally, New York would still be Yorking
* If Florence Pugh's character hadn't gone to Sweden in Midsommar, the tourists still would have died
* If Richard Dreyfuss's character hadn't been in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the aliens still would have made contact, dropped off their old passengers, and picked up new passengers
* If Scott Pilgrim hadn't been in Scott Pilgrim, everyone would probably still just be hanging out more or less the same
* If Matt Damon's character hadn't been in The Martian, they would have all still ended up back on Earth
* If Rocky Balboa hadn't been in Rocky, probably two other people would have boxed and one of them would have won
To each their own, but for my money good stories are about character journeys, not about... I dunno, like, an accounting of what changed during the movie.
Maybe you can refresh my memory? The ark in raiders was a macguffin. The only overtly religious character I remember was the imam. If you mean temple of doom with the Kali cult, that's closer except for one important detail. Other movies are careful to mentally distance depictions by having cults be underground or otherwise abnormal and isolated. Think midsommar, wicker man, etc.
The narrative of apocalypto is literally the mainstream Maya priests kidnapping and torturing people to sacrifice them before the protagonist is saved by the distraction of Spaniards arriving. I would consider the same thing with Christianity swapped a bit distasteful as well, but I can't think of any movies like that. Handmaid's tale would count, but that's a deliberate critique rather than unintentional stereotyping.
Let me present a great counterexample - Adobe want a monthly subscription for Premiere that's about 40 quid a month.
DaVinci Resolve has a free-as-in-beer and a paid-for version. It works equally well (modulo some codec licensing) on Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX. If you go with the Free version, you get a maximum of 2160-height timelines (so 4k landscape video or if you want your Tiktoks in high def, 2k portrait) and you don't get the neural network filtering, denoising, and certain fancy effects (film simulation and so on).
If you want to pay for it, it's (currently) about 300 quid, forever. If you bought a key way back in the early days it'll still work in current (18.1.1 at the time of posting this).
This is serious high-end editing, colour grading, and compositing software, at that, it's not iMovie. Things like Midsommar were cut on it. It appears to be the weapon of choice within Netflix.
You can download it for free, stick it on a potato PC with 16GB of RAM and a GT1030, and expect it to at least work, if slowly.
No subscriptions, ever.
Same, for Finland. The movie Midsommar really captures the mood of endless sunlight.
> bloodless
Most of modern life for most people in the west and even beyond is relatively bloodless. At least not bloody filled :p.
I enjoy films that are slow paced and stick closer to reality. So usually I’d prefer them not to be so dramatic. But I get you mean bloodless in how simple Arrival was too.
I don’t disagree at all with those points about Arrival. However Denis didn’t write most of his films any way, no? I enjoy the concept of time a lot so really just that combined with the visuals are enough for me to love the film. You’re def right on the massive weaknesses.
I gave only a few examples. I don’t pay too much attention to what is the major film in theaters. There’s only like 2 major releases on average per week. Even if it’s 3. That’s only 150 films. There are so many good films put out.
I think modern day stacks up if not exceeds past days especially when you don’t look at the major wide releases that are in thousands of movie theaters.
I think we would end up disagreeing on how good current films and old films are. I would not think of old films as good as you would, etc. if we were to begin listing a bunch out. This same sort of thing has happened with me with friends and music before.
To throw two recent films I watched. Though they aren’t new. The Lighthouse and Midsommar. The latter especially stacks up with how so much coverage of it was framing it as a happy story with a happy ending…when it’s a psychological horror film where every protagonist loses.
It’s also harder to compare only films. TVs golden era is arguably happening now. There’s a lot of very high quality awesome TV. Notably thanks to HBO, Netflix. I think one of my favorite shows, Rectify, was on IFC. Pretty obscure. This takes away from films as people can only multi task so much.
Right. Moreover, it’s visibly memorizing specific images from the movies themselves. It’s very evident for Midsommar and Mad Max, where the renderings contain very idiosyncratic images from these movies which I can’t imagine emerging from mere descriptions of them. So I can only assume that the synopses for these movies contained the actual movie names.
Movies in the 90s and early 2000's were much better than the garbage we get today.
From T2, to Jurassic Park, to the Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Pulp Fiction, Eyes Wide Shut, Fight Club, Cruel Intentions, Mean Girls, 5th Element, Independence Day, etc.. etc..
Something happened after 2007-2008, perhaps it was the shift to digital, where filmmakers started relying more and more on special effects, and less on good acting and storytelling.
The first Iron Man and Avengers were great, but then the formula got very repetitive. None of the DC movies were good, Fast and the Furious are the same story on repeat, both comedies and romantic movies became dumber/more simplistic etc.. etc..
Movies became more like a circus show of forgettable digital effects and less about a good story that teaches something or leaves an impression.
I think streaming might be part of the problem (just lots of churn of a large quantity of low quality movies), but also the box industry started revolving too much around few large franchises, and everything else became a low budget niche.
I think there were still few good movies (Interstellar, Gone Girl, Midsommar, and Parasite), but still much fewer than the previous generation (91-2007), which I think it was a golden time for the movies.
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.
Compared to Midsommar, Audition, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Antichrist, A Clockwork Orange, American History X, or The Human Centipede?
Yeah I would describe GTA as pretty tame compared to those movies some of which have broken through to the mainstream. The average horror movie is more violent and gruesome than even the worst we see from video games.
The Witcher and Mass Effect? Those are adult games with very lame sex scenes all of which are consensual. I don't see that as particularly scandalous.
Would have been fun to see this tree in the film Midsommar, but it would have been terrible if it was damaged somehow (film makers aren't always they best at keeping nature intact, just look at the Maltese beach ecosystem which was destroyed during the filming of the GoT Dothraki wedding scenes).
It's easy. Here's what I did (after 20 months off)
1. Visited Russian owned Wineries in Mexican wine country (yep they have them - they are amazing) 2. Learned how to Horseback ride 3. Volunteered at an orphanage in Latin America (changed my view on business for ever) 4. Moved to Budapest for a while (amazing opera, kick ass clubs, amazing white wine, great caviar) 5. Went clubbing in Stockholm (Midsommar ftw) 6. Went clubbing in Marbella, visited amazing parts of Southern spain, loved it so much settled there (check out a kick ass co-working spot here: http://www.nidomalaga.com) 7. Went clubbing in London - was supposed to go to falconry school but blacked out - LOL just kidding.... noticed a trend here?
Read a gazillion books, caught up on TV, started writing a book, etc. Actually now I'm back on my 3rd start up 'cause I want to get into movie production - self financed. It costs at least $50 million to produce a good movie and another $50 million to market it so I need a to get to work ;)
I thought about posting some screenshots but meh, too much work.
People discounting the whole 4HWW lifestyle - it's real. But who has time to convince other people of something you know to be true...