Hacker Cinema
The Lobster
2015 · Film · 119 min
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
In a dystopian near future, single people, according to the laws of The City, are taken to The Hotel, where they are obliged to find a romantic partner in forty-five days or are transformed into animals and sent off into The Woods.
7 positive3 negative5 neutralfrom 15 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
15 comments on Hacker News
Lately it’s been The Lobster.
I’ve always been one to recognize a lot of absurdities in life, but this movie got me asking: “What if the absurd false dichotomies are the feature that influential people use over their supporters to test their power and loyalty?”
I’ve also been asking myself, what other absurdities do I still not see and how can I systematically detect those absurdities?
Your comment reminded me of the fugitive group from the movie “The Lobster” (2015).
Anyway, it’s not clear to me why these should be prevented or how. Let people do what they want.
You're asking a movie question in a forum that's probably very resistant or even actively hostile to visual storytelling[0]. Weight answers accordingly.
For my $.02, it's a great film. I loved it; we have a cheap IMAX in our city and I must have seen it there a dozen times, and then a few times at home later. Greig Fraser was a fine stand in for Deakins, which was a relief. I love the look of the Lynch film, expected to remember it better than the DenVil designs, but then the new movie surprised me by topping even Tony Masters' fantastic Lynchian fever dream.
As the film tells a story, however, it has some weaknesses[1] that it inherits from the text, and doesn't really completely dig itself out from those. Which is bad - that's an adaptation's only job. The worst of this is probably the choice of ending point: probably the vision in the tent would have been the latest possible moment to do a solid ending, IMO. That single change would have made the movie 10-20% better, and is the lowest hanging fruit. It still baffles me, because Dennis is no idiot, and I wonder if the payoff is next movie.
Another is the character count from the books. I'm going to say some bad things now, so get ready: the characters of Gurney and Duncan should probably have been amalgamated into a Duncan Halleck. There's zillions of other places to do things like this, because Dune is littered with characters who don't appreciably advance the story and disappear after Book 1; Shadout Mapes and Chani could, I think, be realistically amalgamated, and it would be a kick in the pants when you learn the housekeeper is daughter of Liet. Yeah, the book fans are gonna be pissed, but they were going to be pissed no matter what you did, because unlike LotR the novel is a young adult / coming of age story and people get weird about those. I've had friends screaming about the "missing dinner scene" for a year now.
Something more abstract, too, is the lack of an object - metaphorical or physical - that the danger revolves around. Lynch's film dealt with this via several devices: the signet ring, the weirding modules. Dennis' film does not. Now, disclaimer. Dune as a giant metaphor rejects, in its own way, narrative as a generic concept, or at least the heroic narrative, so you have to bite your lip and wonder if this lack is intentional, and Dennis chose to push that absence forward as a metaphor. But metaphor tricks in storytelling only work if they leave the movie's skeleton to function; push them too hard (like, IMO, The Lobster did, critic tonguebaths notwithstanding) and a film can fall apart, like a sloppy abstraction.
[0] This is "Hacker News", after all, and if there's one thing that's core to the word "hacker" it's "text".
[1] "Weaknesses" from a movie perspective, where time is the most critical resource. Vs a book or video game, which can - and does! - stay engaging even when the main character is going to the bathroom, or climbing a mountain, or chopping garlic.
while weird at first, I am reminded on the agencies focused on matching people with jobs. It's a bit similar I think! Reminds me a bit of the movie "the lobster"
Reminds me of "The Lobster". A number of reviewers called it funny and a black comedy. I seriously wondered whether we watched the same movie.
Just don't do it with The Lobster.
The first scene really drew me in to wondering WTF is this movie going to be about?!
The first scene created the mystery. One of my favourite movie openings.
Some of the films recommended in this thread..
- The Nice Guys
- I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
- Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
- Don't Worry
- He Won't Get Far on Foot
- The Favourite (2018)
- Druk (2020)
- Amélie
- The Lobster
- Turist (2014)
- Parasite
- El Hoyo (The Platform)
- Quo Vadis
- Aida?
- 200 Meters
- Luzzu
- El robo del siglo (The Heist of the Century)
- Knives Out
- Us
- Get Out
- "Tokyo Story" (1953, Yasujirō Ozu)
- Aleksei German's Hard to be A God
- Edward Yang's A Better Summer's Day
- Maren Ade's Toni Erdman
- Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love
- Wings of Desire
- Do the Right Thing
- Drugstore Cowboy
- Gates of Heaven
- Beauty and the Beast
- Life Is Sweet
I could not disagree more with the author. I think their argument should be debated on the merits, but it bears mentioning that the author is still in their twenties, and has only seen ~74 movies a year since 2010. That's ... not a lot of movies, by cinema snob standards (or even by prolific Netflix viewer standards).
1. One simply does not run out of great movies to watch after 700 movies, even if all 700 have been great. You have to be way, way more in to movies than that for that to happen. When your go-to examples of great movies are Eyes Wide Shut and Pulp Fiction (two great movies to be sure, but they have over 300k ratings each on IMDb), the problem is obvious: your selections are too mainstream. You can definitely run out of blockbusters that are also great movies very quickly. This author didn't name a single movie I haven't seen, and I'm nowhere close to having seen enough to join the cinema snob club.
2. "Every couple of days I curl up on the couch at 10pm, scroll through Amazon Prime video..." Yes. This is the problem. Their source for movies is an aggregator that makes money primarily through getting you to stay subscribed while reducing the cost of content acquisition as much as possible. Most of what's on Amazon prime is trash, low budget attempts at blockbusters, with a handful of rotating blockbuster films to grab your attention on the front page. Meanwhile, The Criterion Collection has released over a thousand films on DVD and Blu-ray. Get your media from better sources!
Note that I'm not blaming the author for this specifically. The media landscape sucks right now. Everything is fragmented and if you only have access to one or two sources it's easy to see how you could get the idea that prestige TV is where all the serious work goes nowadays.
3. "Most Stories are the Same. Kurt Vonnegut once said that there are only six types of story." Doesn't this claim go precisely against the claim made earlier in the article that the books you read just get better and better as you read more?
4. I can't agree that David Lynch is a hack. I'd say this goes beyond a question of taste into a factually incorrect account of a director who is obviously very capable and knows what he's trying to do. Some movies are going to require more work to appreciate than others. Ironically, the essay itself complains about movies being too accessible! Likewise, Lost in Translation is not unrelatable simply because the main character is older than you are.
5. The idea that we can't make good comedies any more is laughable culture-war nonsense. The idea that adult comedy must utilize irreverence is silly, to begin with. The Favourite (2018), Druk (2020), Amélie, The Lobster, Turist (2014), etc etc are all good comedies that aren't unduly irreverent. It's also strange to see Superbad and The Hangover given as examples of comedy done right in an article about a supposed dearth of good movies.
Even if you want out-and-out comedies (instead of my suggested serious movies with comedic tones), there were plenty of those last decade too. I liked The Nice Guys, I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Knives Out, Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot, and so on. Several of these are rather irreverent, I'd say. I guess if you're looking for more Hangover, they made Part III in 2013, less than a decade ago, and Jackass 4 is coming out later this year! I don't see what there is to complain about. (In the vein of low-brow comedy, there are some movies like Psycho Goreman and Mandy that are much more interesting than a lot of mainstream fare.)
6. Burnout is a thing. Maybe trying to write a review for every single movie you see can lead to enjoying them less, if you're not the kind of person who's wired to do that.
Of course as you watch more and more movies (regardless of the time frame) there are going to be fewer and fewer that surprise you. That's just the birthday problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem translated into film concepts. It's on you, the viewer, to remain comfortable with familiarity, or to seek out the novel, like a person who is bored with fast food taking up Thai food -- maybe when they started out flavors that unusual would have seemed awful, but after your fortieth Big Mac, pad Thai seems interesting. Likewise after seeing many films, maybe The Lobster seems interesting.
The difference between a whitelist and blacklist.
Here is a movie that satirizes the 'whitelist' approach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lobster
> to prevent them from being sad
Or to make sure they are sad and not intrinsically happy alone?:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3464902
;-)
No thats alright. I'm just very tight when it comes to creative works.
Personally, on a bad day, a work that is ONLY beautifully filmed and well acted makes me spew a torrent of curses at the makers, with strange looks from those around me who don't get why I'm getting so passionate about using the word "sht" in every sentence.
And I get very annoyed when others don't acknowledge that there is some truth in what I'm saying. I realise it's the way it comes out from my mouth but seriously, cannot others agree and say "Yeah, that was sht but beautifully filmed and well acted".
Really, it was beautifuly 'filmed', good 'acting', beautiful 'actors' with promising futures but ultimately, and its ok to say it, this movie was a pile of sh*t.
If you liked this movie you will love "The Lobster (2015)", but you should never ever watch a movie with me.
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).
Looks great, also have some feedback:
Some of your trailer and video provider links aren't matching the film described, rather films with similar titles. See the following examples:
The link to watch "The Lobster" on Amazon Prime takes me to "My Village, My Lobster", a documentary about lobster fishermen in Nicaragua[1]
The link to view the trailer for the indie sci-fi film "The Wall" pulls up a trailer for "Roger Waters The Wall", another documentary, this time about Pink Floyd, possibly.[2]
[1]: http://www.amazon.com/My-Village-Lobster-Bil-Yoelin/dp/B00C58SAPC%3FSubscriptionId%3DAKIAILQBWT2AVLRAOG3Q%26tag%3Dfilmfishcom-20%26linkCode%3Dsp1%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3DB00C58SAPC
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuPyeCX7Fgg
> Ever been to a psytrance rave? [...]
...or silent disco.
BTW, there's a great movie "Lobster" [1], where this "anti-social dance" phenomenon is hilariously portrayed in one of the scenes. Highly recommended.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3464902/