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Mute (Spoilers)


DMC

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So who likes Duncan Jones?  If you do, you'll like Mute.  If you don't know who Duncan Jones is, he's David Bowie's kid, so he's pretty cool.  

Bottomline, if you liked Moon, then this will be something even better.  It's futuristic, but in a way everyone can identify with.

Go on netflix and watch it when it comes out.  There's rarely good movies that become available -- this is one of them.

ETA:  There's a pretty damn good trailer.  Right here.

Full disclosure:  Old Best Friend = Uncredited Writer.

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2 hours ago, Martini Sigil said:

@Zorral should get a quarter every time someone uses this word... which... BTW... is nerd adjective awesome... 

Is this a movie?... or a TV show?

Gads I'd be (even more) poor, since I've never used "bladerunnerish" before ever.  O dear.  As Briana says, dying- fall vocal, in Grace and Frankie, the only tv that makes me laff, and it too is a netflix original -- "I don't want to be poor . . . ."

Netflix sez Mute is a movie.

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6 hours ago, Martini Sigil said:

@Zorral should get a quarter every time someone uses this word... which... BTW... is nerd adjective awesome... 

Is this a movie?... or a TV show?

It's a movie. By Duncan Jones who did Moon, Source Code, and Warcraft

So, 2 out of 3, ain't bad and Jones seems to do well with the smaller films.

If this movie is Bladerunnerish in the same way Moon was 2001ish - intriguing original story with detailed stylistic and thematic homages - I'll be a happy camper.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I think it's two interesting ideas that have been mashed together in a way that doesn't make sense.

Nice reference to the Syndicate video game though, and an even nicer use of Nirvana's "Heart-Shaped Box". And Merry/Charlie from Lost showing up as a sex robot voyeur pervert was entertaining.

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6 hours ago, Werthead said:

I think it's two interesting ideas that have been mashed together in a way that doesn't make sense.

Nice reference to the Syndicate video game though, and an even nicer use of Nirvana's "Heart-Shaped Box". And Merry/Charlie from Lost showing up as a sex robot voyeur pervert was entertaining.

Great review!

I didn't find it...terrible. I liked Leo and the actor playing him. 

I'm also much more lenient on movies when watching from the comfort of home.

The Duck pedophile part really creeped me out though and I didn't think that was handled right. Also, I couldn't help but think, especially we are shown this is the same universe as Moon and within three years of that movie since the Sam Bell clone is there, that Moon had the A.I. with Kevin Spacey's voice. Nothing can be done about that now, it just kicked the whole ick factor I felt up a notch.

The other thing with Duck that REALLY bothered me was giving Leo the voice box just to hear him say "thank you" or "I'm sorry" or whatever it was. Jones could have so easily worked a better way in the plot, without much change at all (even if the plot could have benefited from some significant changes) for Duck giving Leo his voice.

I loved the way this movie looked though. It just made so much sense stylistically speaking, to me at least, that in a future where in this future where we have a space agency, or at least one moon base, that looks like 2001, we have an Earth, or at least one city there, that looked like Blade Runner.

I just felt completely absorbed into the atmosphere of the film. 

I'm disappointed, I think I'll ever watch Mute again, whereas with Moon and Source Code are movies I love to rewatch. But I'm not sorry I watched it once.

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I'm in the same sort of place as @drawkcabi -- the lambasting critics are giving it feels wrong to me, but it's certainly a film with some real problems. Performances are all over the place, some of the plot pieces don't really seem to belong (the Dominic Monaghan sequence -- I didn't recognize him with all that makeup -- was one example), and so on.

That said, it maintained this strange, unpleasant atmosphere that made it feel like that, more than anything, was what Jones was aiming for... and in general I can get on board with a film that has a certain atmosphere and maintains it consistently, even if it has other problems.

Paul Rudd was excellent, I thought, playing Cactus Bill, and his chemistry with Justin Theroux was great. Someone on io9 compared them to Trapper John and Hawkeye from M*A*S*H, and there's something to it... but that's if Trapper John and Hawkeye weren't field doctors, but actually were tasked with torturing people. In fact, the casual sociopathy of both characters definitely made this whole thing intriguing, and I didn't mind the pedophilia business with Duck in the sense that it was obvious Cactus and Duck were deeply screwed up individuals. Were they screwed up by the endless Afghanistan war? Maybe. Maybe they were just born that way. Maybe it's a hint that the U.S. Army has been messing around with personnel to make them more capable of atrocities. No idea.

As I've noted elsewhere, the postscript dedication to Jones's father on the one hand, and Marion Skene -- the Scottish nanny who basically raised him when Bowie split from Jones's mother -- made some aspects of the film feel quite personal. Cactus being bizarrely reckless with his daughter -- having her habitually hang out with him in a brothel, for example -- makes me suspect that Jones (who, so far as I know, had a very close relationship with his father -- but a closeness that developed in later years) as a child felt his father was similarly reckless as a parent. I mean, Cactus carries around a Bowie knife, so it feels like it's not far off to think there's something to this.

Oh, as to Leo's voice, I did appreciate that his childhood accident likely happened in part because no one had told him that motorboats were dangerous (being Amish and all), and that his sister (who feels, by the by, like a loose end given that she's such a focal character in the prologue) stays completely silent as the people on the boat call for help... and that his first words are to warn Josie away from danger. But otherwise, making Leo mute felt like a gimmick that didn't have a strong spine.

Is a 0/5 or 1/5 film? No. But I'm not quite sure it's a good movie, either, except perhaps in that it's honest. 2/5 seems about right.

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What an absolutely pointless, awful movie that was. So disappointing, I had really high hopes for it. So many things annoyed me. The "stop being a pedophile, ok? alright lets be pals again" scene being chief among them. Duck's pedophilia seemed to played for laughs throughout most of the film which just grossed me the fuck out. I don't know what the hell Jones was thinking here. Then so many little things just made no sense. Like after Leo attacks the night club Cactus walks in and finds the big bossman alone still sprawled on the floor. None of the goons from downstairs came up to help their fucking boss? They're all just sitting around chatting while he's unconscious up there. 

The ending was silly. Duck's just going to ride off into the sunset to be a fucking creep with his dead friend's daughter (who does not seem the least bit concerned that her father is gone) not worrying about the trail of corpses left behind them, but not before putting himself in the perfect position to be thrown off a bridge. So now the little girl goes to live with her grandmother, still apparently having no issue with her dead father and now "uncle" (despite what a piece of shit he was she didn't seem to know that) and Leo is definitely going to prison (or getting killed) for the night club assault, car theft and possibly two murders. 

It looked good, some of the performances were alright. That's the best thing I can say about it.

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30 minutes ago, Ran said:

I'm in the same sort of place as @drawkcabi -- the lambasting critics are giving it feels wrong to me, but it's certainly a film with some real problems. Performances are all over the place, some of the plot pieces don't really seem to belong (the Dominic Monaghan sequence -- I didn't recognize him with all that makeup -- was one example), and so on.

That said, it maintained this strange, unpleasant atmosphere that made it feel like that, more than anything, was what Jones was aiming for... and in general I can get on board with a film that has a certain atmosphere and maintains it consistently, even if it has other problems.

Paul Rudd was excellent, I thought, playing Cactus Bill, and his chemistry with Justin Theroux was great. Someone on io9 compared them to Trapper John and Hawkeye from M*A*S*H, and there's something to it... but that's if Trapper John and Hawkeye weren't field doctors, but actually were tasked with torturing people. In fact, the casual sociopathy of both characters definitely made this whole thing intriguing, and I didn't mind the pedophilia business with Duck in the sense that it was obvious Cactus and Duck were deeply screwed up individuals. Were they screwed up by the endless Afghanistan war? Maybe. Maybe they were just born that way. Maybe it's a hint that the U.S. Army has been messing around with personnel to make them more capable of atrocities. No idea.

That's one thing I forgot to mention. When I saw Cactus in the Hawaiian shirt and the facial hair and Duck with that Blond hair and glasses, I thought Jones was doing a nod to Trapper and Hawkeye.

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27 minutes ago, KiDisaster said:

Duck's pedophilia seemed to played for laughs throughout most of the film which just grossed me the fuck out. I don't know what the hell Jones was thinking here.

Pretty sure he was thinking about trying to draw viewers into the same amoral, sociopathic worldview of the characters. Treating it with more weight and finality -- like if Cactus just killed Duck -- would have given the character too much of a sense of morality. Juxtaposing his brutal initial response with their laughing it up with their homoerotic jibes makes one realize they have no moral compass.

27 minutes ago, KiDisaster said:

Then so many little things just made no sense. Like after Leo attacks the night club Cactus walks in and finds the big bossman alone still sprawled on the floor. None of the goons from downstairs came up to help their fucking boss? They're all just sitting around chatting while he's unconscious up there. 

More amoral people who lack empathy. I put it down to none of them wanting to be the one with the responsibility of finding out if Maksim was dead or dying (BTW, I rather liked that this Russian mafioso was a black man, and no one had anything to say about it). The whole weird Berlin nightlife -- if I may speculate again -- strikes me as a bit of a dark fantasy of Bowie's wild rockstar days, where we know all sorts of shenanigans involving sex and drugs were going on while people generally just turned a blind eye. Also, Bowie moved to Berlin for a few years when he tried to shake his cocaine addiction, as well. That's where he recorded the Berlin Trilogy of albums, including "Heroes".

27 minutes ago, KiDisaster said:

The ending was silly. Duck's just going to ride off into the sunset to be a fucking creep with his dead friend's daughter (who does not seem the least bit concerned that her father is gone)

I'm hazarding a guess here that this, too, is an exploration of Jones' complex feelings about his father. Bowie was mostly absent from his life in the early years, preoccupied with various things, so perhaps in Josie's  (hrm... just realized its reminiscent of Zowie, which is the name he went by as a kid, and is not dissimilar to "Joey", the name he went by in his teenage years) seeming indifference we're seeing a reflection of Jones's own childhood as he understood it then, or understands it now.

Perhaps seeing the whole thing as a fable, rather than a realistic noir film, makes more sense for evaluating the film. Or perhaps I'm giving Jones too much credit.

 

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