“Passionate and Unruly”
N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott is calling Benh Zeitlin‘s Beasts of the Southern Wild (Fox Searchlight, opening today in NY & LA) “a blast of sheer, improbable joy, a boisterous, thrilling action movie with a protagonist who can hold her own alongside Katniss Everdeen, Princess Merida and the other brave young heroines of 2012. There are loose threads you can pull at — sometimes the wide-eyed wonder slides toward willful naivete, and there are moments of distracting formal sloppiness — but the garment will not come unraveled.
“A lot of thinking has gone into Beasts of the Southern Wild, about themes as well as methods, about the significance of the story as well as its shape. And it is certainly rich enough to invite and repay a healthy measure of critical thought.
“But its impact, its glory, is sensory rather than cerebral. Let me try out an analogy. Discovering this movie is like stumbling into a bar and encountering a band you’ve never heard of playing a kind of music that you can’t quite identify. Nor can you figure out how the musicians learned to play the way they do, with such fire and mastery. Did they pick it up from their grandparents, study at a conservatory, watch instructional videos on the Internet or just somehow make it all up? Are you witnessing the blossoming of authenticity or the triumph of artifice?
“Those are interesting questions. They are also irrelevant, because right now you are transported by an irresistible rhythm and moved by a melody that is profoundly, almost primally, familiar, even though you are sure you have never heard anything like it before.”
I’ve posted this a couple of times since Sundance but here, again, is my original review, which I titled “Rank, Robust, Ecstatic”:
The passionately praised film “is everything its admirers have said it is. It’s a poetic, organic, at times ecstatic capturing of a hallucinatory Louisiana neverland called the Bathtub, down in the delta lowlands and swarming with all manner of life and aromas, and a community of scrappy, hand-to-mouth fringe-dwellers, hunters, jungle-tribe survivors, animal-eaters and relentless alcohol-guzzlers who live there.
“It’s something to sink into and take a bath in on any number of dream-like, atmospheric levels, and a film you can smell and taste and feel like few others I can think of.
“Beasts is much more of a naturalistic object d’art than a narrative-driven drama, at least as most of us define that term. The emphasis is on sensual naturalism-wallowing — lush, grassy, muddy, oozy, leafy, stinky, primeval, non-hygenic, slithery, watery, ants up your ass — with a few story shards linked together like paper clips.”
Movie sounds like a load of white-guilt poseur horseshit to me…. WHITE DIRECTOR = BULLSHIT O CLOCK, wow I really need some nerdy white clunky glasses thrift store DORK to outline the YOUNG BLACK EXPERIENCE for me.
Plus the kid’s name is HUSHPUPPY.
That’s literally the most embarrassing thing EVER. A white DORK directs a movie about a SEARCHING BLACK KID IN HER WORLD OF MYSTERY AND HER NAME IS HUSHPUPPY, that’s fucking DESPICABLE and EMBARRASSING.
No one will EVER EVER EVER Did I say EVER rewatch this on DVD EVER, so go ahead and pump this up when you’ll be watching Spider-Man or TDKR for the next decade on BluRay and this’ll collect dust.
GUARANTEED.
@KitLatura1 ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’ is probably going to win the Oscar for Best Picture so you better get used to hearing about it a whole lot.
I haven’t seen it yet but just from the trailer I can tell it’s a very special movie and Quvenzhane Wallis should be nominated as Best Actress for EVERYTHING. oh and I LOVE the name ‘Hushpuppy’ !!
This is SO not gonna win best picture, there’s NOBODY FAMOUS in it, and NOBODY in the academy is gonna award some backwoods white-guilt medicine about some androgynous black kid living in a WORLD OF MYSTERY, nobody CARES, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOBODY CARES.
I didn’t even know that kid was a girl until just now. HUSHPUPPY. EMBARRASSING.
Won’t even be nominated, looks AWFUL, and the director is a WHITE NERD so it’s RACIST on general principle.
Why would a rich-kid DORK wanna make a movie about black kids in the bayou? Just make a movie about pussy and aliens and gunfire and collect your paycheck.
Movie won’t make a dime. GUARANTEE
Why don’t we wait to see the film before judging it, particularly with the positive notices this has already received?
How do we know this film won’t do well in the box office? You can’t judge an indie by blockbuster standards.
“The Artist” didn’t star anyone really famous. Neither did “The Hurt Locker.” They both won, and over films with much more famous casts.
How do we know how this film will live in posterity? It’s not like the first three Spider-Man films hold up well today, when indie fare from the same period continues to get play on Blu-Ray and DVD. There is more to films than pleasing fanboys/girls.
Face it, unless there’s gangsters and gunfire, movies about poor black people that are “positive” are kind of BORING. Even CHRIS ROCK said this on his show once. No black person alive will see this, just CLINKY GLASSES WHITE ARCLIGHT DOUCHEBAGS thinking they’re LEARNING A LESSON. Yeah, I really see DUDES IN COMPTON rolling to the fucking LAEMMLE’S to watch some Buckwheat kid in a bad afro live in her WORLD OF IMAGINATION.
NOBODY cares.
And SERIOUSLY?
You can pretend you do, but if you’re honest? YOU DON’T know any REAL BLACK PEOPLE from South LA. My BOYS from COMPTON would be BORED OUT OF THEIR SKULL watching this.
Have any of you, ANY OF YOU, ever met a REAL LOS ANGELES BLACK GUY? Like from Compton who you meet at jury duty? I used to work with a dude like that, and if there wasn’t a KILLER ZOMBIE or KILLER MONSTER, he had NO IDEA what to make of a movie. His Netflix QUEUE was ALL monster movies, rap DTVs, gangster shit….
Some WHITE NERDS directing a movie about HUSHPUPPY IN HER WORLD OF WONDER, this dude would’ve thrown that shit out the window faster than fucking Kerry King trying out a Winger cassette.
BOMB
It sounds to me as if we have a lot of assumptions about black people and what they like and don’t like. I don’t know about blacks from South L.A. (whether the real or presumably “fake” kind) but there are a wide variety of black folks with all sorts of film tastes, not just “gangsters” with a limited cultural outlook. Presumably these gangster types might not have enjoyed “The Artist” and other Oscar-friendly films but that film was still successful. As far as this film, again, given the rapturous notices it has received, should we not wait to see the film before judging it?
It’s getting “rapturous reviews” from tweedy white coastal nerd critics who’ve never actually spoken to a black guy.
Just see the film, Lex. Go to whatever town you want after seeing it, but do that first.
I can’t wait to see this. So pumped.
Good to know I checked back in to see that the thread count fluffier made his drunken way over here. Super. I hear this is a really special film and can’t wait to see it.
@Kit How do you know who these “white coastal nerdy guys” have spoken to?
Jeff is now acknowledging the new identity of someone he banned from the site permanently and swore he would never let back in.
How meta.
“This is SO not gonna win best picture, there’s NOBODY FAMOUS in it, and NOBODY in the academy is gonna award some backwoods white-guilt medicine about some androgynous black kid living in a WORLD OF MYSTERY, nobody CARES, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOBODY CARES.”
Slumdog Millionaire, anyone? Also directed by a white dork with glasses.
I don’t think this will necessarily take the gold either, but in the last decade we’ve had BP winners as unlikely as that Indian-populated story, a silent French film, a fantasy epic, and an Iraq war film with no big stars.
FWIW, Robert Koehler hated it for reasons not all that dissimilar to our friend here, suggesting it may even be “something of a fraud”. He adds that, “We’re going to look back, again five years from now, and think ‘What were we thinking?’ …the critical consensus on that film is astonishing. Every year there’s a film like this, usually that comes out of Sundance.”
That Sundance line is incisive and properly damning.
Looks like a lame Malick wannabe.
So a movie about black people is called “BEASTS of the southern wilds.”
Naturally white people think it/s the greatest thing they ever saw.
I challenge any of the armchair racists in these threads to tell me of any time that white children have been compared to animals is a so-called dramatic film.
Small wonder so many white people like it.
Now tell me again why Spike Lee gets ignored and this horseshit gets rave reviews? Better yet, save it. I’ve not reached my bullshit-quotient for the day.
And interesting how the kid is called “Hushpuppy.”
I guess they figured since “Buckwheat” was already taken they better come up with something else.
Now, does any moron still want to tell me cinema isn’t taking huge steps backwards?
GUY WITH A HANDLE FROM A FINCHER FILM THAT SUGGESTS OVERCOMPENSATION SAYS…
Ha, yeah that’s about right. More of the same from ol’ lexie. See, I’ve got a wife, a wife that loves me with alacrity. I’m not alone. I work at a plant, yes but it’s a plant making dog toys that help people distract their animals while they watch Idol, or whatev. See, I’m a writer, a writer of some renown, no biggie, but a writer. Two Mackleburg trophies in three years for my short stories in the Mackleburg Gazette. Lexie TALKS about writing. See the difference?
Sucks to be you! Don’t feed tha troll, yo.
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So a movie about black people is called “BEASTS of the southern wilds.”
Naturally white people think it/s the greatest thing they ever saw.
I challenge any of the armchair racists in these threads to tell me of any time that white children have been compared to animals is a so-called dramatic film.
Small wonder so many white people like it.
Now tell me again why Spike Lee gets ignored and this horseshit gets rave reviews? Better yet, save it. I’ve not reached my bullshit-quotient for the day.