1178 Triangle of Sadness

[swo17]

from today's NEON press release:
NEON’S SLATE OF AWARD WINNING FILMS TO JOIN THE CRITERION COLLECTION, INCLUDING ALICE DIOP’S SAINT OMER, LAURA POITRAS’S ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED, RUBEN ÖSTLUND’S TRIANGLE OF SADNESS, BRETT MORGEN’S MOONAGE DAYDREAM AND CELINE SCIAMA’S PETITE MAMAN

I am quite frankly dumbfounded that a movie that recieved such universal disdain from the mainstream major American film press as Triangle of Sadness possibly met Criterion’s internal standards - the movie recieved absolute pans from the head critics at NYT, the New Yorker, New York Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Film Comment, Rolling Stone…. Just shocked they just follow the Palme I guess.

I'm just as dumbfounded that it doesn't have all the awards momentum that Parasite did a few years ago--it's extremely well made and hits many of the same beats but is still enough of its own thing to feel fresh. Unless we like rich people now

[Ribs]

It’s difficult to become a leading awards contender (to win - though it seems like it will be pull off an acting nomination and Ostlund is definitely still in the mix for director) when the film has such universally terrible reviews from every important outlet. You can like the movie fine, and obviously it has sway over a lot of people, but usually Criterion cares about releasing movies that most respectable critics don’t find laughable! I can’t think of a contemporary title they’ve released that had such a bad American press reaction.

[swo17]

I haven't read any reviews and am surprised to hear they're so negative, though I suppose that would explain why it's gotten relatively little awards attention outside of the Golden Globes. I think both The Square and this handily deserved their Palme wins, though the former was too modest a film to manage the weight of that kind of attention. Triangle though played like a raucous crowdpleaser to me, hence my surprise. But what do I know

[therewillbeblus]

I love it too, but even if I think the accusations of 'unimaginative satire via capitalizing on low-hanging fruit' are misjudged, I can understand how some people would fail to see the rich material embedded within the loud exteriors, or critique its elongated structure. Both Triangle of Sadness and The Square seem designed to challenge the audience with their third acts, which I think are brilliant keys to understanding and appreciating the depths both films are mining, but still provoke the traditional skeleton of 'crowdpleaser' beyond just a marker of length

[therewillbeblus]

What a disappointing slate of extras. Nothing about/featuring Charlbi Dean or Dolly De Leon, but an interview with this guy

[yoloswegmaster]

More disappointed that they didn't bother adding any of the 3 early Ostlund films that we know they have the rights to. Also looks like they omitted the essay info.

EDIT: It also looks like no HDR or Dolby Atmos track despite it showing up on the German UHD release.

[DeprongMori]

Count me among the disappointed on the supplements here. This is the first Ostlund film I’ve seen, and as it’s the first released by Criterion I would have expected more historical and contextual extras. What they do provide seems more typical of a mass-market release. In general, labels like Indicator are doing much better releases on the whole these days than Criterion. Fingers crossed they’ll up their game.

[therewillbeblus]

EDIT: It also looks like no HDR or Dolby Atmos track despite it showing up on the German UHD release.

Okay, so as long as the German subs are removable, that'll probably be the one to go with

[beamish14]

More disappointed that they didn't bother adding any of the 3 early Ostlund films that we know they have the rights to. Also looks like they omitted the essay info.

EDIT: It also looks like no HDR or Dolby Atmos track despite it showing up on the German UHD release.

Didn’t this film also have a longer, work-in-progress cut at Cannes? It would’ve been nice to have it

[yoloswegmaster]

More disappointed that they didn't bother adding any of the 3 early Ostlund films that we know they have the rights to. Also looks like they omitted the essay info.

EDIT: It also looks like no HDR or Dolby Atmos track despite it showing up on the German UHD release.

Didn’t this film also have a longer, work-in-progress cut at Cannes? It would’ve been nice to have it

There is only one version of the film.

[zedz]

Didn’t this film also have a longer, work-in-progress cut at Cannes? It would’ve been nice to have it

I think Ostlund speculated about releasing an even longer cut after the Cannes win, but I don't think anything came of that (and maybe it was a joke.)

[colinr0380]

I have not seen this film as yet but every time it crosses my radar I keep thinking about that Alan Bleasdale written play Self Catering, in which a group of people stranded on a desert island end up somewhat unconsciously taking on archetypal roles of famous figures from cinematic history (including Jane Horrocks turning into Marilyn Monroe!) and of course ends with a Peter Greenaway-style blackly comic punchline that explains the title!

[yoloswegmaster]

More disappointed that they didn't bother adding any of the 3 early Ostlund films that we know they have the rights to. Also looks like they omitted the essay info.

EDIT: It also looks like no HDR or Dolby Atmos track despite it showing up on the German UHD release.

The essay is listed and I received a response from the ever-reliable (and totally real) Jon Mulvaney on the lack of HDR (though they didn't talk about the lack of Atmos):

I can confirm that our upcoming director-approved 4K UHD edition of TRIANGLE OF SADNESS will be SDR, as the filmmakers did not create an HDR master of this release.

[tenia]

I guess the German HDR/DV grade thus is an internal pass, not something aesthetically originating from the movie itself (a HDR "upconvert").

[yoloswegmaster]

Bizarre to create a new pass if one wasn't created by the director themselves. I'm also curious to know if the Atmos track is something that was also created internally considering that the French and Finnish blus don't have the Atmos track.

[yoloswegmaster]

This is also only available to screen in 4K SDR on iTunes 4K with no Dolby Atmos track, so it looks like the German label really did create their own track and HDR.

[knives]

Finally saw this and it might be the best for me Östlund, but even with that the fact I could never jive with its humour prevented me from getting anything out of it. I’d probably rank it as slightly better than the Ritchie Swept Away and far less than DeMille’s Four Frightened People in terms of the genre.

[thirtyframesasecond]

I wasn't a huge fan of this film - the class structure being turned on its head when a ship wrecks - is almost a genre of its own. Mocking influencers, models and the rich is like shooting fish in a barrel too. I liked the subplot with the two elderly British grenade makers though.

[therewillbeblus]

I don't think Östlund is *as* interested in mocking these types of people, so much as carefully construct a muddled soup of social dynamics that simply cannot function in today's climate, or does in a very depressing way through fatalistically resilient individualism, rather than the collective ideal sought by each inherently-egocentric one of us. There are clever callbacks to earlier messy conversations on sexual politics that get twisted around and elevate the work from a state of just taking cheap shots at low hanging fruit in the final act, and the subtext is brilliant. I get the complaints. I get that we're all repelled by the pronounced thematic shots and not the subtler thematic text, but it's there, and very much the point that the rest of the aggressive deconstructing (or.. decomposing) allows to be revealed.