I thought it was just fine. Some not-so-sly social commentary mixed with some… well, obvious social commentary. Lots of great actors essentially slumming and seemingly having a great time.
The previous administration was a farce, tone deaf, low-brow, and usually flat-out uncomfortable. And I am not just talking about Trump’s ridiculous hair…so that shoe fits like a glove?
Yes, that was the point I was trying to make, but probably could have made more clearly. Hence the comment about it being farce instead of satire. The American right has killed satire by moving beyond it. If you really want to satirize the Trump administration, you have to do it with something vicious like Death of Stalin or High-Rise. Adam McKay pussyfooting around in movies like this (for the LOLs!) and Vice (gotta respect the office of the VP if you’re going to get an Oscar-worthy performance out of Bale!) isn’t gonna cut it.
-Tom
I am with Tom, I found Don’t Look Up, to be disappointingly unfunny. There a fair number of chuckles, but only a couple of genuine laugh-out-loud moments. I did like the ending(s). “What everybody is talking about is topless urgent care” Meryl, Lawerence, and DiCaprio were all way better than the script.
I think if this had been pre-Trump and pre-Covid it might have been better, but I’m not sure. Honestly, it super hard to do satire and probably will continue to be true for the foreseeable future. What if Trump 2.0 bans satire and no one cares, cause it is not funny?
Worth watching, if your expectations are low.
Fair enough. But I think the line between farce and satire could be a game of hopscotch at this point.
Although I am still thinking about this simply incredible scene with a tech billionaire tearing into a scientist, at that point in the film, which I already think is too long, is something completely else.
Yep, that was my favorite scene in the movie. Mark Rylance is incredible, isn’t he? About ten or so years ago, I got to see a production of Twelfth Night with him playing Viola (!). It was in the round, in a tiny room, with the actors simply playing inside a ring of chairs. There couldn’t have been room for more than 50 people in the audience. If I’d put my legs out, he would have tripped on them. It was that intimate. And as you can imagine, it was amazing.
-Tom
I’m watching this movie @Rock8man style, in a few chunks (while on the treadmill.) Comments here have lead me to believe that perhaps this isn’t something I really want to dedicate my highest quality time and attention to.
After about an hour of movie, I’m rooting for the comet. There are some throw away lines that provide a few smiles - in particular, when Kate is telling her boyfriend in the middle of the street about how everyone’s going to die in 6 months, and a passer-by says “wait, what…really?” and Kate replies “In a video game” and the passer-by moves on. There’s a little of sprinkles of side comments from mostly minor characters that are amusing, but the leads all seem to play it straight - at least as straight as people who are caricatures might be expected to, anyway.
I watched it and immediately thought of Borderlands 3, which was panned by the cognoscente but I felt was the best game, perhaps not story, that the franchise had produced. Why I bring that up is that Don’t Look Up is essentially a story about scientists vs. politics and social media, and as the tastemakers right now are social media personalities with a strong bent towards politics, it probably got treated a bit rough. BL3 was damn near a punch in the nose against streamers which didn’t help it a bit in the review afterlife.
Either way, I quite liked the movie but was also nonplussed at the wishy-washiness of the main cast.
The premise of this movie was executed in a more succinct manner in this old Mitchell & Webb sketch:
Meryl Streep and Jonah Hill deserve a special mention of delivering terrible performances. I guess they were either miscast or the director didn’t dare to contradict their reading of the script. Whereas Streep’s delivery just felt off to me (as if she didn’t know how to say her lines), the entirety of Hill’s performance sounded ad-libbed.
It wasn’t all bad; I enjoyed Lawrence, Rylance, and Chalamet in their roles.
My theory – which I concede is a bit forced – is that Adam McKay took pains to give Trump supporters an “out” so they could enjoy his dumb movie without feeling alienated (he did the same thing in Vice, which was a grotesque whitewashing of Cheney’s legacy marketed to liberals like me, but carefully sanitized for Republicans to enjoy as well). One of the “outs” was making the President a woman. That way I can see President Orleans as Trump and the radical right can see President Orleans as Hillary. Best of both worlds!
You might think this sounds far-fetched, but consider the scene with Timothy Chalamet praying and how heartfelt McKay wants that scene to be (he claims that scene is how he got Chalamet to take such a small part). That scene worked for me in isolation, because I think you guys know how sympathetic I am to religion. The idea of a supposedly dumb skater punk harboring secret faith could be good writing in another context, so I did like the reveal about Chalamet’s character. But I think it’s in there specifically to pander to people who want to insist America is a Christian nation, and that we acknowledge our faith in God when we do selfless, wonderous things like having our last meal with the wife and kids we abandoned so we could fuck a Fox News anchor who was making eyes at us when we were briefly famous. Amen. As long as we go out embracing family values, what we did before doesn’t matter. Grace of God and all that, dontcha know? Hollywood loves to pretend it’s pro-Christianity. It brings in the red states!
Don’t Look Up is the worst kind of satire: the kind that’s reluctant to offend.
-Tom
I agree with this but I also think Don’t Look Up suffered b/c it pulled its punches on the biggest issue with the analogy to climate change/COVID: the availability of alternatives, which we idiotically refuse to pursue. In Don’t Look Up, the comet was going to smash the Earth no matter what. There was no solution, and the whole jury rigged starship thing was a joke. But in our present reality, which is what Don’t Look Up really should have been satirizing, we have alternatives to frying the planet or endemic COVID mega-deaths, which we are not fully pursuing. We are making choices, bad ones, and that’s the real source of the tragi-comedy that is 2010s and 2020s America.
Don’t Look Up is quite possibly the comedy that I’ve seen that most pulled its punches. It had a few fun bits but man, what wasted potential. Especially given the very severe realities it failed to shine much of a light on. The best satire reveals and illuminates. Don’t Look Up… didn’t.
I really appreciate this thread because I am entertained while reading it, and I didn’t have to waste any of my time watching this movie to do so. Thanks everyone.
Special thanks to @Space_Inhabitant, that clip was great.
I don’t think this is accurate. While the first plan to destroy the comet has dumb stuff tacked on in the form of Ron Perlman, I think that it is intended to portray an actual plan that would have succeeded.
But they abandon it because a giant multinational corporation says that they can instead make a ton of money.
It’s a pretty on the nose satirizing of not addressing climate change because the corporations saying that it’ll hurt the economy.
I was going to skip this after reading the last few posts, but actually I kind of enjoyed it, although it’s not really a feel good story.
The movie is pretty much a long series of fucked up things, that are in fact exactly the kinda of things that are happening every day.
I think that one thing that is perhaps disturbing about it, is that normally you might say, “oh look, there’s a extreme portrayal of crazy aspects of our society, with an equally extreme end result, meant to call attention to the absurdity”.
But the stuff in the movie is honestly not that much more absurd than stuff that is actually happening. Not that it’s not absurd, it definitely is. Yet is only perhaps…5% more absurd than reality? Maybe not any more absurd at all? And the results that we are seeing from our absurd actions in the real world, while perhaps not as catastrophic as the actual obliteration of the entire earth, are still catastrophic to a degree that is hard to really get out heads around, and it’s exactly that enormity of the potential for cataclysm that makes it easier to ignore… Because to not ignore it is terrifying to the extent that our brains can’t deal with it.
Surely we can’t be watching authoritarianism rise in western countries. Surely we can’t be watching democracy fail. Surely we can’t be watching permanent, major changes in the Earth’s climate. If those things we happening, what could we do? Whatever it might be, it would probably be hard.
And to that end, there are things that this movie highlighted which are worth noting, mainly the prime message that simply denying the very reality that we exist within doesn’t work, and will end badly.
Also, the cast is really top notch.
It may not be for everyone, but if you are just sitting around you might wanna check it out.
Because I watched this while in the midst of making my way through The Entire History of the Earth podcast, I probably had a different reaction to this than some.
When they were talking about how the comet impact would destroy all life on earth, I was like, “Why so glum, chum? The anaerobic bacteria that live in deep-sea hydrothermal vents will probably be fine. Then it’s just another billion years or so, and boom, you’re back in business.”
I liked it a lot. I think, once I got past the point at which the movie was trying to be more of an idiocracy than a sly satire. I think it was sold that way, but it didn’t end up being that kind of movie at all. It felt more like old McKay stuff rather than the newer stuff like the big short, vice.
It was at times even almost zany. Mark Rylance was so good in this, it is worth watching the whole thing for him alone. God damn his take on the zuckerberg/musk/bezos billionaire was just perfect. He felt almost alien. I think Streep was great, but a lot of the people around her were meh… I think that Jonah Hill was miscast, it felt like he belonged in another film. Timothee Chalamet was actually great too, and was a perfect late addition to the story.
The ending really got me though, the way it unfolded, the issues with the launches, all the way up to the dinner at the end. That dinner scene was so well acted by all, with rumbles and flickering lights, small grimaces of terror held not 100% back, trying to have a nice meal while ignoring it all.
Like, I guess I didn’t expect much more from McKay’s stuff after Vice, which I enjoyed as well, but had a lot of problems with. I guess I felt the same way about this, like there were a lot of problems, but there were plenty of fun things I laughed at.
Definitely put me in the ‘Mark Rylance is awesome’ fan club.
And I do think the movie is definitely still worth watching. Running the gamut of politics, news media, social media, going viral, visionary tech billionaire influence, and the corruption of sudden fame; all railing against science and math showing the world is doomed in 6 months? It’s fine.
Yes. The boyfriend had no point in the movie except as the token Christian. Then he says something at the end which the entire group of atheists accepts. That Jennifer Lawrence doesn’t roll her eyes at his evangelism either is also a signal of acceptance
I assume the president’s “famously late” is some sort of signal to the right that they can pretend it’s Killary.
Smells like a last minute addition to script for marketability
I liked the tech billionaire. I assume that’s Peter Thiel. (Edit: It is an accurate portrayal. I detest tech bros gods who think they will save the dumb masses with their cleverness)
You’re talking about giving the President role the possibility of being Hillary Clinton, but it’s also the case with the prayer moment. From the Variety interview I linked upthread:
It’s funny how McKay can’t even hide his disdain with this slip of the tongue: “We’re so used to thinking of religion as denominations, and now it’s become a political cudgel in this country. I forgot about real faith.”
His thought process seems to be that “denominations” aren’t real faiths. I know what he’s getting at, but it’s a pretty telling verbal slip.
Also, my friend and erstwhile co-podcaster Kelly Wand said that he liked the gag about President Orleans forgetting her son back on Earth and also the bit with the alien dinosaurs. “That movie really picked up in the last 3 seconds,” he noted. Man, I really miss the -opses.
-Tom
I think he may be correct.
Religious denominations are essentially just clubs. I think they are separate from the actual faith that is supposed to serve as the underlying foundation of those denominations, although this isn’t to say that you can’t be a member of a religious denomination and ALSO have real faith. But the denomination itself is not the faith.
I think the criticism here, that’s valid, is that many people take on the mantle of these groups, not just religious, but political or cultural as well, almost as though they are a sports team.
Many people turn something that is supposed to be deep and meaningful, and turn it into something shallow and meaningless. They call themselves a Christian, for instance, but have no real regard for any of the religious and moral values that Christ taught.
I didn’t see Chalamet’s character as some kind of token appeasement to Christians, as much as highlighting the fact that a political “team” doesn’t actually own something like Christianity.
I haven’t seen the film but it sounds ironic, given this comment, that most evangelicals I know would actually describe themselves as “non-denominational”.