Hacker Cinema
Swiss Army Man
2016 · Film · 97 min
Directed by Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert
ComedyDramaRomanceFantasyAdventure
Alone on a tiny deserted island, Hank has given up all hope of ever making it home again. But one day everything changes when a dead body washes ashore, and he soon realizes it may be his last opportunity to escape certain death. Armed with his new “friend” and an unusual bag of tricks, the duo go on an epic adventure to bring Hank back to the woman of his dreams.
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10 comments on Hacker News
agree with you on The Substance. another movie Serpell lazily categorized as new literalism. like your sibling comment i think the bar for lowest common denominator for me is lower than for you
last year i thought Hundreds of Beavers was a lowest common denominator movie but it turns out to be cult and im 0/5 on any of my family members liking it at all. a few movie nerd friends love it like i do. after that i decided normys must only like watching families hug on screen. i guess EEAAO has that, i just see the Swiss Army Man inside of EEAAO and think of the whole thing differently
most likely i have no grasp on what normys like
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)
There's also that Harry Potter spinoff movie in which he becomes a supersonic corpse with a farting jet-butt in order to visit some pretty redwood parks: https://www.inverse.com/article/17614-how-swiss-army-man-made-daniel-radcliffe-s-farts-fly
Oh they exist, they just have a much harder time finding work, and when they do get to make something it rarely gets the same marketing push as comic book shared universe project #87. Some great movies still come out, but you probably never hear about them if you aren't actively plugged in to the scene.
I think filmmakers like Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (Swiss Army Man, Everything Everywhere All at Once) are where Hollywood should be focusing their attention, and their sweep at the Oscars this year has me cautiously hopeful that at least a few people in power are paying attention.
> Everything Everywhere had a lot of style and the potential to be a great film…
"Great" is subjective. We all experience art through our own lens, and for me it was magic. I'm glad that, sometimes, Weird Shit™ like Everything Everywhere All at Once, Swiss Army Man, etc. can somehow make it through a system that abhors risk.
I do think Daniels are a great example of actual counterculture like this article is talking about. Swiss Army Man is weird as shit, and deeply affecting. EEAO has very much broken into the mainstream while preserving a lot of their style and sensibility. I think there will probably be a set of filmmakers in the future who saw their movies at a young age and thought "you can do that?"
Saw it last weekend and loved it but still can't decide how much. Swiss Army Man was basically a screwball comdedy filmed like an art movie so when the wtf moments happen they stood out as WTF? Everywhere is very comic booky (almost too comic booky for my likeing) and it contains just as many wtf moments (if not more) but because of it's comic book nature the wtf stuff doesn't stand out as sharply as it did in Swiss Army Man. It all kinda blends into one big ball of crazy. Nonetheless, still lots of fun, lots of laughs.
In the meantime, consider In the Mood for Love which is paid homage or Swiss Army Man, directed by the same fellas.
Don't get what's "great" about these movies. According to IMDb, the ratings are: Synchronicity: 5.5 Lazer Team: 5.7 Southbound: 5.9 The Witch: 6.7 10 Cloverfield Lane: 7.3 Midnight Special: 6.7 The Lobster: 7.1 Hardcore Henry: 6.8 Elstree 1976: 6.1 High-Rise: 5.7 TMNT: Out of the Shadows: 6.0 Swiss Army Man: 7.1 Kubo and the two strings: 8.1
Surprised I didn't see any of the following on that list: ARQ (6.4), Project Almanac (6.4), Self/Less (6.5), Chappie (6.9), Star Trek: Beyond (7.2), Ex Machina (7.7), Train to Busan (7.6), The Martian (8.0).
for the most part it feels like TV shows don't have that pressure to fit into a very tight box.
Don't they? I feel like TV is a lot more constrained than movies. The forced "last time on XYZ" cadence means that it's very difficult to have natural story-lines when things need to be wrapped up in a suitable emotional resolution and/or cliffhanger every 22 or 45 minutes. Especially when the writers are working with 25% of the screen time being commercials (thankfully much less of a problem with Digital-first TV from Netflix, HBO etc.).
I think it's a lot easier to write and produce a quality movie about just about anything. Yes the mass-produced sequel machines look pretty cookie cutter, but you also get some extremely well-told stories like In Bruges or Wes Anderson's stuff. There's anything-goes stuff like Swiss Army Man. I feel like this kind of thing couldn't realistically be produced for TV. The acting, writing, and production value falls off a cliff very quickly as soon as you leave the mainstream. Even a single season of a TV show means 6-10x as much content as a movie, and consistently conforming to the structure of a serial TV show means the content feels inevitably more repetitious.