I remember watching Antonioni’s Il deserto rosso (Red Desert) with some friends and being mystified by its seeming lack of plot. All I really remember is an attractive woman wandering around an industrial area. According to Wikipedia, the woman has sex at some point, but I don’t remember that.
Forgive the hijack, but when I wanted my kids to go to bed, I’d tell them we were just about to watch a movie called “A Long Boring Movie about Grownups Eating Spinach,” inspired of course by “My Dinner with Andre.”
Just this afternoon I watched The Man From Earth, based on some positive comments on the Movies You’ve Just Watched thread. It’s a bunch of people who talk with a professor who is leaving his job, going on to do something else. They meet at his house, watch some movers pack his stuff, and share a bottle of expensive whiskey. It reminded me of My Dinner With Andre in that there’s a lot of talking and probing questions, and except for a sad denouement of a minor character, it’s just talking, however interesting it is.
With a soundtrack that sounds the same backwards as forwards.
The man from earth, no?
Thanks, I fixed it (On to From)
This is one of my very favorite movies. A lot happens in this film, but little of it is physical.
Cool.
Yes I enjoyed that movie too. Even though it’s a very B-movie style and cast, it’s engaging throughout.
The dialogue style reminds me a bit of some of the cheaper Stephen King movies (no bad thing).
Re: Koyaanisqatsi- I have to disagree. Everything happens. It is the best explanation of us imaginable. The music is what it is.
Two that I really enjoyed, that feature huge vistas of everyday normality, are Paterson with Adam Driver and the Japanese movie about a toilet cleaner Perfect Days. I would happily watch both of these again. Perhaps not as a double feature.
Do not watch the sequel. By chance I saw it first, which was a big mistake. Seeing it at all is a big mistake. It sets things up for a series which as far as I know never happened. Thank Og for small miracles.
A lot of low budget indie movies tend to start in the middle of a story and end in the middle of a story. No proper introductory scene, no dramatic conclusion, just stuff happening. Some great character moments, some comedy, some romance, some tragedy, but just at an ordinary degree and without any clear consequence.
Watching too many movies like that can get a bit frustrating after a while.
How about “Locke” which visually is a man driving down the highway on a rainy night, talking on the phone with his wife, while his life completely disintegrates around him?
I was hesitant to see “Nomadland”, because I feared that it would be depressing, but at least to me, it was very uplifting. The main character did what she had to do after her husband died and the mine where they both worked closed.
I immediately thought of the film A Ghost Story starring Casey Affleck.
IIRC, the film starts with Affleck’s character having just died or he dies in the first few minutes. The rest of the film is him “haunting” the house he lived in with his wife, but by haunting i mean mostly just observing what happens in the house after his death. I remember really enjoying it in the theater when it was released, but acknowledge that you’d really have to be in the right mood for this type of film to enjoy it.
Whoa, really? I mean, the style overall is quite serene and meditative, but the things that happen in that movie include two children encountering and interacting with various kinds of magical nature spirits that appear and vanish at will, the younger child (mistakenly believing that their hospitalized mother is dying) getting lost trying to carry some food to her in the hospital, the older child and the entire community panicking about the missing child and initially believing her dead, and the lost child eventually being rescued by the intervention of said nature spirits including a magical cat-shaped bus. That felt like a fair bit of action to me.
Same, but that’s another Studio Ghibli movie that I wouldn’t describe as “nothing happens”. Two teens meet and start falling in love, they spearhead a project to preserve a beloved building that eventually requires a personal appeal to and personal visit by a major prefectural official, one of the teens’ mysterious antecedents are partly revealed, leading the two to mistakenly believe they are siblings and must repress their mutual attraction, and finally the full truth is revealed.
I mean, I think there’s a difference between “quiet-toned movies focused on events of daily life” and movies in which there aren’t really any notable events at all. A lot of Studio Ghibli movies are the former type (though there are also some big apocalyptic-fantasy numbers like Nausicaa), but IMHO that doesn’t make them the latter.
If you think about it, up until the climactic fight scene, nothing much happens in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The characters talk, watch TV, act, watch movies, spar, meet some hippies, reminisce… it’s basically a hangout movie that ends with Susan Atkins being killed by a flamethrower.
Speaking of hangout movies, how about Car Wash?
It’s been ages since I’ve seen either of these, but how about…
The Big Chill
The Breakfast Club
These are in the territory of “lots of exciting stuff happens but most of it doesn’t affect the outcome”. They can be described by “stuff happens but nothing changes” rather than “nothing happens”
Taking The Breakfast Club, for example, it would be nothing happens if they served a boring detention, talked a little, worked on assignments, and goofed off a little. Maybe there’s a tense moment when two of the boys seem like they might fight, but then nothing comes of it. That’s the slice of life nothing happened version. In the (more entertaining) movie, everyone goes through a life changing moment with a lot of drama and angst as a side dish. Something happened.