Rules Don't Apply (Warren Beatty, 2016)

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hearthesilence
Joined: Fri Mar 04, 2005 4:22 am
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Re: Rules Don't Apply (Warren Beatty, 2016)

#26 Post by hearthesilence » Fri Mar 03, 2017 4:40 pm

FWIW, Dave Kehr praised this (and Zemeckis's Allied) as being two of the year's most underrated films.

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domino harvey
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Re: Rules Don't Apply (Warren Beatty, 2016)

#27 Post by domino harvey » Sat Mar 04, 2017 1:51 am

This ended up being quite an unusual film, with what looks like a three hour narrative whittled down to two via some occasionally disorienting rapid editing and peculiar pacing and rhythms. The notes Beatty chooses to glide past and those he savors are so unexpected that like Emak-Bakia I already look forward to revisiting, if just to study the structure and outlay of the picture's narrative!

Rules Don't Apply toys with notions of purity and societal expectations by overlaying the smaller interactions of Lily Collins' contract hire against the notions of not just Howard Hughes' larger than life reputation but the lasting idea(l) of the twinkling final days of the studio system. It's likely the last chance we'll get for a film about this era to be made by someone who participated in it, even if only at the tail end, and the overall vantage doesn't concern itself with reverence so much as exploring how Hughes’ waning hold on not just his power and prestige but his sanity itself mirrored the end of an era for Hollywood and sexual mores as well.

The film is a bit of a scattershot mess, scrappy and frequently half-baked in its touchpoints. And yet Beatty’s film is also wonderfully peculiar. Just when we think we know where this is all going, the film veers off to a series of graphic sexual encounters that stretch the boundaries of its PG-13 rating, replete with visual gags involving a bodily fluid most assuredly not found in the films of the time. Beatty pauses the picture to hold for delightful extended moments of spontaneity that feel refreshing, all while fostering a pleasingly simple romance that is contrived and artificial in the best spirit of the studio films these characters walked right out of.

In many ways the film itself is like a great Hollywood classic that was filtered through so many reshoots and creative wranglings behind the scenes that the end result is unclassifiable in tone. And to the best of my knowledge, all of this was achieved without anyone standing too far in the way of Beatty doing what he wanted to here. Beatty has too many ideas to fit the one film he has left in him, but he does his damnedest, and the end result is an interesting film. So few of these exist that most of us do the heavy lifting ourselves afterwards as second-nature. I look forward to revisiting and unpacking this film’s wild, (under/over)cooked ambition far more than I anticipate revisiting countless "better" films that left me less engaged and inspired.

John Shade
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Re: Rules Don't Apply (Warren Beatty, 2016)

#28 Post by John Shade » Fri Aug 18, 2017 5:19 pm

Finally got around to seeing this. When a film is a box-office "bomb" is it because the initial screenings go poorly? I have no memory of this playing at a cinema near me, as I would have seen it.

I'm going to give this a full endorsement. I'd almost like to see more biopics blatantly play around in this way, without the sort of allegory of something like Amadeus.Playing off on what some others are saying, this succeeded in spite of it not really being a bio-pic, not really being a romance. I'm not exactly sure what it was, but it definitely wasn't as bad as critics claimed. It was never tightly constructed, but it was never off the rails either. The three leads are all enjoyable, and the cinematography looks good.

Some of the surprising elements: the time and seriousness given to the Protestant faith and its related dilemmas for Lily Collins and Alden Ehrenreich. The latter's mop-hiding gag post-make out was a surprising and amusing one, as domino points out.
SpoilerShow
I think it was kind of a joke, or every Baptist's nightmare, that the first time a good Baptist girl drinks she then goes on to have sex with an older celebrity and ends up pregnant.
There was some playful chemistry and worthwhile conversation between the two as opposed to some of the forced stuff in recently acclaimed Hollywood centered romances. There are moments of poignancy too, such as the burger bonding scene.

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Ribs
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Re: Rules Don't Apply (Warren Beatty, 2016)

#29 Post by Ribs » Fri Aug 18, 2017 5:26 pm

I don't really feel like the critical reception was out-and-out negative; it was more "it's alright, but I don't understand it." But that's always been a bit of Beatty's charm as a director - all his movies are messy, he's not afraid of things going on too long or looking a bit off and not really making coherent narrative sense because he just wants to nail individual moments where he hammers home what he wants to say. They're just so totally earnest. Beatty outright said in tons of interviews that he views this film as a discussion of sexual puritanism, and that's the kind of blatant frankness regarding motivation many auteurs currently thriving miss out on, focusing on more and more abstract, indefinable concepts.

It went wide at multiplexes around the country over Thanksgiving, but pretty much disappeared after the initial two-week period.

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DarkImbecile
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Re: Rules Don't Apply (Warren Beatty, 2016)

#30 Post by DarkImbecile » Thu Sep 13, 2018 12:06 am

Variety: Inside the ‘Rules Don’t Apply’ Fiasco
Moviegoers complained that the film dragged in the middle, and most of those under 40 had no idea who Hughes was. According to a report from the testing company, viewers described Hughes’ eccentric behavior as “frustrating,” “disturbing,” “distracting”, “repetitive,” “annoying” and “boring.”

But Beatty dismissed the feedback. According to Yariv Milchan, Arnon’s son and a top Regency executive, Beatty argued that the test audience — which was 25% Latino and 19% Asian — was “too ethnic.”
The film cost $31.1 million to make, and grossed just $3.9 million worldwide.

It was also one of the most complex single-picture financing arrangements in recent Hollywood history, with over 100 contracts governing investors’ various rights and obligations. The investors — who sealed their commitment to the project at a fateful dinner at Nobu in Malibu in 2013 — are a who’s-who of Hollywood’s playboy elite, including Steve Bing, Ron Burkle, and Brett Ratner.

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