Hacker Cinema
Nomadland
2021 · Film · 108 min
Directed by Chloé Zhao
A woman in her sixties embarks on a journey through the western United States after losing everything in the Great Recession, living as a van-dwelling modern-day nomad.
10 positive4 negative6 neutralfrom 20 commenters
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20 comments on Hacker News
"Sorry we created this AI that took away your job and made you homeless, but in exchange you can use our cool app for free that will help you escape starvation and maybe even find the optimal homeless shelter! And think of it -- your sacrifice has made it possible for devs earning 6-figure salaries to be more productive, and doctors to write better emails, and the USA now has a higher GDP than ever! Large corporations profits are up! Society (for the rest of us) is better because of it."
Reminds me of Walmart putting small business owners in a small town out of business and then offering them a minimum wage job at their store.
I recommend watching Nomadland if you haven't already. (Update: Unless you were being sarcastic, in which case, carry on.)
With those preferences stated (I almost listed Lady Bird!) I'd toss on:
- Nomadland — Lonely older woman clinging to the bottom rung of the economic ladder is pushed into van-living and finds community. Basically positive-but-bittersweet vibes by the end, and with a similar strong reliance on setting and mood to something like a Wes Anderson work (though without the precise placement of every single element in frame), but definitely not "cute" like his are, and not about comfortable rich people. Includes many real people living in vans, blurring the lines between fiction and reality (and deftly almost-entirely avoiding the usual problems that come with including non-actors in a film). Lots of great outdoor shooting and lighting work.
- Red Rocket — Struggling, middle-aged male porn star moves back to his small, blue-collar hometown in Texas. We learn about his still-evolving relationships with the people he left behind when he moved away to LA, and see him make some... choices. Probably the most into archetype and symbolism of anything I've listed except maybe The Green Knight. By the end, is very much about its protagonist as a kind of daemon, if you will, of a part of the American experience and spirit (and also a representation of one or more sorts of real person with whom one may be familiar from one's own experience). Great attention to detail for a certain kind of ordinary setting, in the way that Anderson or maybe Miyazaki pay attention to that kind of everyday detail, but employed to obtain perfectly-trashy environs that aren't at all pretty but are also entirely true-to-life, not caricature. If you've spent time in such places, the clutter, the way trash has accumulated, the way in which the miniblinds are broken just so, and the way the people exist in that space, will feel very familiar.
- Eighth Grade — Bo Burnham's only film (I think?). Akin to something like Gerwig's Lady Bird, I'd say, but less heightened and more "real".
As software devs. we can save, right? :). Not sure the same logic applies to people on low wage jobs. Or people like the characters in the movie "Nomadland" (which is supposed to be true to life)
I’ve been thinking about a van life game too! - I traveled around the country in a travel trailer during the pandemic. Saw a lot of inner city homelessness, but also places like Slab City and Taos Mesa where people live an off-the-grid lifestyle.
The van life community is pretty unique because van dwellers are oftentimes adventure seekers; the state of drifting is sometimes by choice. Though the lifestyle brings challenges regardless, like parking restrictions, space limitations, loneliness, high maintenance cost, etc. And most of all, vanlife is still outside of conventions and one can be judged for it. I’d love to explore these dynamics thru a game.
P.S. Nomadland has been one of my favorite films. The book is just as good. There are millions who try to find peace on their own terms.
I wonder how all of this will affect the seasonal workers who depend on the Amazon work in the fall.
The movie Nomadland is an amazing portrayal of the lifestyle and concerns of a community that is connected to Amazon workers, but afaict could find themselves losing out if the warehouses are all union.
>Even the talented people—you could take Dune, made by Denis Villeneuve, an extremely talented, gifted artist, and you could take No Time to Die, directed by…Gary?”
Cary Fukunaga.
Cary Fukunaga—extremely gifted, talented, beautiful artists, and you could take both those movies, and you and I could go and pull the same sequence out of both of them and put them together. The same sequence where the cars all crash into each other. They all have that stuff in it, and they almost have to have it, if they're going to justify their budget. And that's the good films, and the talented filmmakers.
It is interesting but when I watch Denis Villeneuve last films I really ignore all this genre thing because I'm so at awe of his execution. Similarly, when I first watched Tarkovsky's Solaris I quickly lost track of the plot but was drawn to the uniquely crafted cinematography and hypnotized by the deliberate manipulation of pace; at the end I was watching a movie by itself instead of contrasting it with my reading experience beforehand. The same could be said about the seamless implementation of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" into the Vietnam setting of "Apocalypse Now"
[Arrival has imho a very noticeable weak plot, it is only when you read the short story "Story of your Life" that it fits nicely in. Nevertheless once you ignore that apparent flaw, it is a wonderful shot movie.]
The "marvelisation" has gone so absurd that here you are in 2019 after dozens of franchises watching "Joker" (in parallel with another Joker version at the backdrop of Ledgers last peformance) which subversively utilized the marketing ploy into tricking the audience watching a deeply disburting indie-film about the chasms of our society depicted in a masterfully balanced unstable character drawing by an actor using nearly his whole skill set.
Cervantes as a prisoner of his time quite successfully played with the readers expectations of "chivalry romance" (a popular franchise back then) to express himself artistically in a new way we now call a "novel". You laugh and cry at the same time when reading through the book, a comedy, tragedy, persiflage, psychoanlysis, slap-stick ... it really is a mess. Embrassing the mess is not something you can persuade "rational thinking" types in the movie industry making the decisions, so you trick 'em. Unfortunately nowadays you have to do a lot of lip-service. I don't know about Chloé Zhao but "The Rider" and "Nomadland" were great movies, I wonder what "Eternals" meant to her aside the recognition of entrusting her with a 200$ million budget.
I’ve been watching a lot of factory tour videos (most are in China) on YouTube. Especially the electronics kind. I notice that the ones pre-2015 are full of humans and now it’s a lot more machines.
On one hand, automation will help bring back manufacturing competitiveness in the West because the capital expenditure is going down (a dobot mg400 which is ~$4k) and labour is essentially $0. On the other hand, what will happen to all the low cost labour in the developing nations? Such as the migrant workers in China?
Forget about here in North America where UBI is a possibility - I think we can agree UBI is not possible in low income countries.
One thing about all this is that Trades or service jobs such as salons - I don’t see that being automated anytime soon.
Btw whenever the topic of Amazon workers comes up I think about the movie Nomadland. Check it out if you haven’t watched it yet.
It's true that it's a cynical interpretation, but at the same time I feel that as a society we shouldn't romanticize poor people working themselves to death as some kind of noble struggle. Same issue I had with the Nomadland movie.
Don't want to get into an argument, but it may be worth some caution to consider it insane to just want to exist in the world as most other animals do. The film Leave No Trace and to some extent Nomadland touch on this concept pretty well.
The business of running movie theatres is what he is talking about and it's certainly changing.
In Denmark the movies Godzilla vs. Kong, Nomadland and Black Widow will not be shown in major cinemas.
The reason is that Warner Bros. and Disney (Marvel) have either shortened the exclusivity period (Warner Bros) or set the streaming premiere at the same day the movie airs in cinemas (Disney).
The core of the issue is that the cinemas have to pay the same amount although the terms are clearly worse.
I can't help but think that the loss in sales of merchandise will take a hit, but i could be wrong and things will continue as they are now.
I consider it the “western frontier” type person, and it goes thru Texas, Utah, Nevada and up to Idaho the Dakotas and Montana, with smatterings of eastern Washington, Oregon and California. Which makes some sense just from a hereditary standpoint since much of it’s only been started to get settled (by non natives) for a hundred years. Nomadland as a movie does a good job of getting the mood right.
Thanks, I read this expecting not to like it, but it resonated with me a lot. This past Oscars show, I'd seen only two of the Best Films nominees, and they were both streamed. I also tried Nomadland and I turned it off.
TV has indeed taken over. The creativity of Breaking Bad or Succession or Yellowstone is what we used to watch movies for. Real creativity is always there and it'll go where it's appreciated.
I don't want to make this tl;dr so just one more thing: I hosted A.O. Scott at Google [1] and I mentioned that I never look at Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic. I read him, and whoever's on the Roger Ebert site. An 80% "score" from a bunch of stupid people is still stupid.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Kh3-DGU3l4
You're right. The movie Nomadland is based on the book, but has been fictionalized.
This opens with one of the the people featured in Nomadland, (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9770150/) the Oscar winning film from last year.
The author mentions various denials in his review, ironically, in my view, missing the pivotal case of denial that forms the conceptual warhead of the piece. Look at Fern. Why Fern? Why her, as the key nomad, rather than anyone else? The author's explanation is trite and contradicts points he highlights earlier in the piece:
>Fern, like the protagonists of many frontier stories, is called to represent nothing short of the national project itself — its triumph and, in the case of this film, its decline. These narratives have always been de-politicized, their origins in genocide rubbed clean, their most reactionary elements tucked away. We are asked to empathize with the pioneer as a universal American subject in a way we are not asked to empathize with stories about more banal forms of poverty, or homelessness, or the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous land. Frontier stories are like the public lands the film relishes — pretty, but rooted in a violence that their prettiness only obscures.
but see:
>Nomadland is the highest-profile cultural engagement with the nomad phenomenon to date
and
>Chloé Zhao, a Beijing-born director whose previous film was about a struggling Lakota rodeo star, is fond of making films from a far outsider’s perspective.
The suggestion that the film is yet-another misbegotten paean to the American Dream falls flat in light of its creator and its context. Nor does the bleak outlook of the protagonist seem emblematic of the ideology of capitalism. But alluding to the horrors of the past is a lot easier than original thinking.
Fern is a consciously chosen protagonist. Her motivation for nomadism is not an inessential part of the narrative. It is revealed in her reaction to her in-laws' trivializing and romanticizing her situation. But it is also revealed in her refusal to settle down.
If you never find a new home, it can't replace your old one. As long as Fern still lives in the van, home will always be in Empire, Nevada. That's the infrasonic melancholy resonating through every scene.
Fern, the metonymic American, is in denial that Empire is gone. End scene.
Maybe the Oscars should just become a proper film festival. They're definitely starting to align with the major festivals, Parasite having won the Palm d'Or and Nomadland the Golden Lion. Maybe they should just go that route. It will be admitting defeat in some ways.
Alternatively...stream the damn event on platforms people actually use. I don't want to sign into ABC one time every year to watch the stupid event. And I especially don't want to sit through regular commercial breaks. Transition to a different revenue model and have YouTube/Netflix/Facebook host it. Ffs you could make it a Twitch stream and it'd do better.
Key excerpts:
> For the first time since 2003, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV did not air the Academy Awards, with outlets receiving instructions to “play down discussions” of Sunday’s ceremony. Some have attributed the boycott to the nomination of the documentary “Do Not Split” by Anders Hammer, which follows the 2019 Hong Kong protests, as well as controversy surrounding Zhao.
> In March, as her film won international plaudits, Zhao was hailed by Chinese state media as the “pride of China” and her film was scheduled to be released within the country at the end of April. After Internet users found a 2013 interview with Filmmaker magazine where Zhao described China as a country where there were “lies everywhere,” praise-filled articles were removed. “Nomadland” did not appear in Chinese theaters on April 23 as scheduled.
> “Why is Weibo blocking Chloé Zhao? What happened? All related Weibo posts have been censored,” one user wrote on the platform. Others noted that Zhao’s Oscars win did not appear among the most searched topics, a list that is often manipulated by the platform. One blogger wrote in frustration that the only Oscar-related content they could find was that of a singer named Oscar Wang who had been unexpectedly eliminated from a boy band contest run by Tencent.
The world must look a very gray place to you.
Is our curiosity about the world not one of the fundamental features of humanity?
The fact that a man is able to rediscover his fervor for life in something as lowly as an octopus seems to me to be nothing short of beautiful.
The film is antithetical to our fractured modern society of ease, reason, disregard for our lowlier neighbors on this planet, and mindless consumption.
Its frustrating to me that its expectedly relegated to the doc category while a vapid, shallow commentary on modern life such as Nomadland is nominated for best picture.
There is a distinction between home and house. Nomadland is a good film, if you're interested in seeing a form of houselessness one step above a tent on the side of the street. You'd be surprised how many of the "regular looking" people you interact with day-to-day are unhoused and live in their cars.
Regarding your point about shirtlessness if there were an entire media cottage industry dedicated to depicting shirtless people as barely-sentient zombies spreading their infection to all you hold dear, then yeah maybe you'd want to reinforce that people should still view you as a full person.
I think English is quite versatile and escapes your desire to circumscribe it.
If this sort of thing interests you, watch Nomadland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomadland_(film)
It's about people in American with similar situations who decide to go off grid. And like the OP are a bit older, not necessarily the hippie type.
The movie is quite stark and realistic. A mix of documentary and drama. And it starts Frances McDormand from Three Billboards, who is excellent in it.
That said, this lifestyle has absolutely no appeal to me. What do you do when you get older? I mean much older? Is a 70 year going to be lugging propane tanks around and doing odd jobs for food? There needs to be some sort of plan, doesn't there?