Hacker Cinema
The Green Knight
2021 · Film · 130 min
Directed by David Lowery
An epic fantasy adventure based on the timeless Arthurian legend, The Green Knight tells the story of Sir Gawain, King Arthur's reckless and headstrong nephew, who embarks on a daring quest to confront the eponymous Green Knight, a gigantic emerald-skinned stranger and tester of men.
7 positive2 negative4 neutralfrom 13 commenters
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15 comments on Hacker News
Agreed. There are lots of movies that are hard to watch. A modern one for many people is "The Green Knight". I made it to the end but personally the movie didn't do anything for me and I don't agree with the praise.
I generally don't skip forward but I did on several parts of Pluribus. There were several segments that were clearly just filler and after the first episode or so where they stuck out it just got tiring. Made up example (Character: "I'm flying to Vegas", the 3 minutes of pack, get in car, drive car, get to airport, walk through airport, wait in lounge, board plane, sit in plane, de-board plane, pick up rental car, drive toward city, shots of city, get out of car, see lobby, get in elevator, arrive on floor" for 2-3 minutes. You could argue a segment like this is supposed to convey tedium or the fact that the character is the only person in all of these shots, but that was established 3 episodes ago. Now it's just filler. A good editor would have cut it but a series like Pluribus has a contract to provide X hours of content, and so they fill it up.
Some movies I watched recently:
"The Long Goodbye" (1973) - I'm not recommending it but I found it interesting/different enough that I'm glad I watched it.
"Madame De..." (1953) - This one was too slow for me. I stopped about half way through. Nothing iteresting had happened.
"The Enchanted Cottage" (1945) - I enjoyed though it was as little cloying
"Marked Woman" (1937) - It was overly melodramatic but Betty Davis was great at being strong and, I had no idea hostess culture was ever a thing in the USA which I found fascinating. It's still a thing in many parts of the world (and I have no issue with it to be honest)
You might like Dual (2022)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_(2022_film)
Not quite as heavy with the symbolism and not super-duper about dealing with terminal illness & loss like Annihilation (though… it does have more than a little of that going on). Similar feel otherwise. Also sci fi.
Maybe The High Life (2018).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Life_(2018_film)
Another sci fi. I haven’t sorted this one out as well as I have annihilation, but I’m pretty sure it’s also best read entirely figuratively.
And of course everybody who likes brooding symbolism-heavy films really must watch The Green Knight (2021)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Knight_(film)
(That one’s not sci fi)
(Not the poster you’re asking)
What sort of thing are you into? What are some movies you really like? Would help to tune any suggestions.
[edit] Meanwhile, some shots in the dark:
- The Green Knight — Based on the story by the Pearl Poet and expanded and adapted with a combo of other Arthurian tales and the filmmakers’ own twists. Basically, a lonely, somewhat psychedelic (but not in a bright-kaleidoscope-colors sort of way…) dark fantasy journey with tasteful hints of dozens of influences adorning it. A great Winter watch, too. Benefits from the best screen and system you can get in front of.
- You Won’t Be Alone — Broadly horror-themed but not in a Hollywood monster movie or Halloween popcorn muncher sort of way. It’s not really aiming for scares, exactly. Comically similar themes and message to a major widely-lauded off-kilter film from the same year (2022) but approached from a very different angle. Macedonian language. You may worry in the first twenty minutes that you’ve stumbled into the Easter European Indie Movie Doldrums of Mediocrity, but persevere, it starts to come together and develop purpose before long. Hard recommend for fans of The Witch who liked the “historically accurate” grossness & mythology of that film, but it’s not as firmly in the horror genre as that was.
On the lighter (and not quite as good, good) side:
- The Kid Detective — Semi-comedy. Imagine the stereotypical middle-aged guy who’s never topped their time as a high school quarterback. Now imagine if instead of playing football, they were a kid detective (you know, Nancy Drew sorts of stuff) and that is the thing they peaked at in high school. That’s our protagonist. Film sags at times but the premise is so fun and relatively-well-used that it’s still a good time, if that blurb above piqued your interest at all. Certainly a sort of noir, with all that entails, so if Your Hero getting his ass kicked more than doing the ass kicking bothers you, avoid (as with lots of noirs)
- Spontaneous — Dark high school romance-comedy. Also, people, all over the place, have started occasionally suddenly exploding for no evident reason. That’s the movie’s deal. It took me embarrassingly long to realize what it was really about (or, at least a major one of the things it’s about) and it punched me in the damn gut when I did. Oof.
This has such a high chance of being a fun but forgettable mass audience generic fantasy. I don't think any Zelda game had a incredible story, it was basic evil darkness takes over world and must be stopped by unlikely hero. They all had amazing atmosphere though. Would be great to see it take more of an art house cinema style like The Green Knight, but I doubt that will happen.
> The quality of their product has ceased to matter.
Most people don't go to the theater (or even stream) to watch "quality," they go for entertainment. Artsy films might have a lot of artistic quality (like The Green Knight, for example) but most people don't care, they'll watch the latest blockbuster, which is where studios make the most money. For the people who do watch artsy films, understand that the blockbusters make the bulk of the revenue to even greenlight artsy films; without the mass market films, there wouldn't even be any artsy films (of a sizable budget like 10 to 50 million dollars, not true indie or art house films).
Interestingly, it would be ironic if, were these strikes to go on for a longer time, studios would simply think to invest more into AI which doesn't have the sorts of problems mere humans might, hastening the demise of writers and actors. This must be why it was reported that negotiations broke down as soon as AI was thrown in there, they definitely want to bet on that as the future and I'm not sure what leverage actors and writers have, honestly. It seems like whichever way the strike goes, studios won't budge on that issue.
Edit: removed art house label as it was inaccurate.
It's strange that Netflix would do that. In Germany, they pioneered consistently offering original audio. (For instance, Amazon Prime Video was available earlier than Netflix here, and originally most of their catalogue was dubbed to German exclusively.) Plenty of services where you can rent this movie also offer it in English (OV): https://www.werstreamt.es/film/details/2097679/the-green-knight/ So it may very well be some weird licensing deal where they only get to offer this specific film for streaming without a surcharge if they stick to dubbed audio.
The movie "The Green Knight" came into Germany's Netflix recently. An English movie about an Arthurian legend and you can only watch it in German without any subtitles. Ludicrous.
Can someone shed some light on the regulations in practice regarding subtitles? As an expat living in Germany, there's plenty of times that the offerings have no subtitles in English and are dubbed. Do they have to pay more license fees to include English subtitles?
I usually love this kind of movie. I am a Joseph Campbell fan. I enjoy allegory and metaphor in films.
But this movie sucked. The guy who made it plainly does not understand the Green Knight story, and turned it into some anti-hero bullshit to, what, make morally sick people feel better about themselves? I'm not sure.
Gawain was one of the greatest knights. He was a rockstar. But in this movie he's not particularly skilled or courageous. The ending is a complete letdown.
Hahaha, I expected the criticism of my comment to be that too much of what I was counting as good is "high brow", in fact. Too artsy-fartsy. Leaning too much toward "The Green Knight" and not enough toward "Jaws".
[EDIT] Here, lemme just list the 2022 movies that I think were worth a watch if you're at all into the kind of thing they were doing:
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever Glass Onion Top Gun: Maverick Bullet Train All Quiet on the Western Front Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio Crimes of the Future Death on the Nile Everything Everywhere All at Once White Noise Nope Prey The Sadness You Won't Be Alone Dual The Northman The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (arguably just a less-exciting RRR, but hey, it makes up for it by also being shorter and non-horror comedy *is* a bit weak lately, so it gets in) Watcher Dashcam (one of the most interesting movies I've seen in a long time—you may hate it, but you'll feel *something*, damnit!) The Banshees of Inisherin
This is just ones I've seen (I usually manage, like, 1/2 of the films in a year that I want to watch, at best) and excluding a few that did in fact suck or that I didn't think quite merited inclusion (e.g. The Menu) or that are good for what they are but are pretty narrow in appeal (Violent Night). Like, I hear Cyrano is great, Emily the Criminal, Bodies Bodies Bodies, The Whale, and a bunch of others, but haven't made it to them yet (and, inevitably, I'll end up never watching some of them).
"Quite a few of those are sequels, remakes, or adaptations! White Noise was a book! Death on the Nile! One of those is a marvel movie!" yeah, I know—good luck finding an era in Hollywood when a ton of the films, and even a ton of the good films, weren't such. I reject that as, specifically, a complaint about this moment in cinema (it has more merit as a criticism of cinema in general)
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.
I was on the side of modern music against autotune critics in the last thread, and find myself against the pro-CGI "modern movies are fine" narrative in this one, interesting.
For me it feels like visual effects set the bar higher for greater spectacle. It's more easily to be jaded by spectacular effects and to become accustomed to them. (I'm also pickier towards films, often imagining how imagery could have looked better or the story could have been told different.) It also feels like we're in an era where many Hollywood films can easily have access to great cinematography, stunning aerial shots of natural vista, etc.- and then it just ends up looking like Mac wallpapers. So many films can have that National Geographic documentary look, even arthouse pictures like say The Green Knight. Is it just easier to film on location than it used to be?
Dont' watch modern media. Dive into old films that stand the test of time. Anything by Godard, Kurosawa, Fellini, etc.
I have awful attention spans, but I find that if I challenge myself by watching stuff out my comfort zone, I'm able to pay attention to it so well. If I know it's a great work of art, I find myself paying attention to just about every single shot, the composition of the frame, etc. It's incredibly rewarding, and it definitely makes watching most modern content impossible now
(That being said, I absolutely loved Pig and The Green Knight from this year)
> On the other hand, we just saw The Green Knight and that one will throw you.
I think I'm going to need at least two more viewings to get from "OK, I see it saying a lot of things about several themes or ideas, and I can tell what at least some of those themes or ideas are, but I have only the vaguest idea what it's saying about them" to "ah, now I get it."
Great movie.
Do Christopher Nolan films have a reputation for being baffling? I've never had that experience with them.
On the other hand, we just saw The Green Knight and that one will throw you.
Tons of great movies are coming out all the time.
Go check out The Green Knight. It's outstanding, and it's in theaters right now.
Or almost anything else A24 releases. And that's just one studio.