Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016)

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mfunk9786
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Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016)

#1 Post by mfunk9786 » Sun Jan 24, 2016 4:02 pm

Sounds like the Antonio Campos film about Christine Chubbuck (which is something that has haunted me ever since reading about it in high school and that I've always thought should be made into a movie by someone capable) is his first great one. Here's Guardian's 5 star review, Variety's very positive review

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Re: Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016)

#2 Post by mfunk9786 » Tue Jan 26, 2016 3:48 pm


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Luke M
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Re: Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016)

#3 Post by Luke M » Tue Jan 26, 2016 4:28 pm

I feel like I'm the only one who has never heard of this story. I have been very familiar with Budd Dwyer's story but never heard of Christine Chubbuck until reading about this film.

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Re: Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016)

#4 Post by mfunk9786 » Tue Jan 26, 2016 4:46 pm

What's always made it so haunting to me is how for something that happened in the public eye, there's no existing footage of it, and very little of Chubbuck at all. And her lifestyle, personality tics, and downfall really do sound like something out of a movie. It was one of the factors that informed Network, which was released 2 years after this incident.

There's something about local news that I've always found terrifying and filled with dread (which is probably why Nightcrawler worked so well for me last year and why something like stumbling onto Vester Lee Flanagan's Twitter account and seeing the videos he posted last year as he posted them shook me so hard). There's something just so lonesome and naked and frightening about the behind the scenes mechanics of a local news broadcast and the personalities and politics within, under the surface of the typical mainstream concerns over sensationalism and snow forecasts. It takes a very unusual personality to want to work in that sort of environment, and to want to achieve whatever it is a local television journalist feels like they're striving to achieve.

When I was younger and thought I might have the patience and talent and creativity in me to try my hand at writing a screenplay, this woman and her story was what I wanted to write about the most. So I'm sort of over the moon that this is coming, and from someone with such raw visual talent as Campos, who I'm praying becomes something more than a provocateur. Expecting a stunningly drab and dour mid-70s aesthetic and will be shocked if that, or Rebecca Hall's performance, disappoint.

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Re: Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016)

#5 Post by Soothsayer » Tue Jan 26, 2016 5:07 pm

Luke M wrote:I feel like I'm the only one who has never heard of this story. I have been very familiar with Budd Dwyer's story but never heard of Christine Chubbuck until reading about this film.
Nope, I hadn't heard of this until yesterday and I wound up losing 2 hours researching the story. I'm excited to see this film. Rebecca Hall's performance sounds amazing.

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Re: Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016)

#6 Post by Professor Wagstaff » Tue Jan 26, 2016 5:10 pm

mfunk9786 wrote:What's always made it so haunting to me is how for something that happened in the public eye, there's no existing footage of it
Doesn't the footage exist, but her family owns it?

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Re: Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016)

#7 Post by Werewolf by Night » Tue Jan 26, 2016 5:28 pm

According to Rebecca Hall in the interview linked above, the family destroyed the footage. Probably a very wise thing to do.

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Re: Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016)

#8 Post by mfunk9786 » Tue Jan 26, 2016 5:42 pm

I don't see why they'd have kept it. I'm sure someone along that chain must have made a copy of it for some reason or another, but I doubt it ever sees the light of day unless this film brings a ton of attention to it that it didn't already have among the sort of morbid filesharing community that makes stuff like this and what happened to R. Budd Dwyer (I really really recommend not watching that, by the way) so well known, relatively speaking.

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Re: Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016)

#9 Post by Numero Trois » Wed Jan 27, 2016 3:20 am

Werewolf by Night wrote:Probably a very wise thing to do.
Yes. Otherwise it could've gone the route of the Sharon Tate photos....

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Re: Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016)

#10 Post by davoarid » Wed Jan 27, 2016 3:42 am

mfunk9786 wrote:Sounds like the Antonio Campos film about Christine Chubbuck (which is something that has haunted me ever since reading about it in high school and that I've always thought should be made into a movie by someone capable) is his first great one. Here's Guardian's 5 star review, Variety's very positive review
I'm one of those who considers Afterschool a masterpiece, so I'm very excited for this--though a bit disappointed to learn he won't be bringing back his great DP from that one (Jody Lee Lipes).

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Re: Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016)

#11 Post by colinr0380 » Wed Jan 27, 2016 1:01 pm

I've sometimes wondered whether in addition to Network was alluding to this event too.

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Re: Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016)

#12 Post by dadaistnun » Wed Jan 27, 2016 1:28 pm

colinr0380 wrote:I've sometimes wondered whether in addition to Network was alluding to this event too.
I haven't listened to it since the laserdisc came out, but the incident might have been mentioned in the director's audio commentary.

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Re: Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016)

#13 Post by mfunk9786 » Sat Jan 30, 2016 3:58 pm


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Re: Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016)

#14 Post by gcgiles1dollarbin » Sat Jan 30, 2016 4:13 pm

I'd recommend Don DeLillo's Running Dog (1978)--written during a heady pre-internet decade of snuff rumors--if the borderline metaphysical pursuit of legendary, morbid actualities interests you.

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Re: Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016)

#15 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Sun Jan 31, 2016 12:34 am

I hope with whatever acclaim this winds up with, that it pumps some life into Michael C. Hall's film career.

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Re: Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016)

#16 Post by mfunk9786 » Tue Feb 09, 2016 11:25 am

Quietly snatched up by The Orchard, who released last year's great The Overnight, and will be released later this year along with a Best Actress campaign for Rebecca Hall

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Re: Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016)

#17 Post by barryconvex » Tue Feb 09, 2016 9:53 pm

i think i remember reading about chubbock in an old issue of answer me! magazine, probably in the same issue as budd dwyer and the 100 greatest suicides. i'm not much into morbidia but i'm looking forward to this...

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Re: Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016)

#18 Post by Luke M » Wed Jun 08, 2016 7:22 pm

Videotape of her suicide apparently does exist.

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Re: Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016)

#19 Post by mfunk9786 » Wed Jun 08, 2016 10:39 pm

That poor old woman. Well, this is pretty huge news in that universe and while I do hope people stop bothering her over this, I am interested to see how long it takes to get out there into the public sphere and in what form that occurs.

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Re: Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016)

#20 Post by Manny Karp » Thu Jun 09, 2016 12:52 am

mfunk9786 wrote:That poor old woman. Well, this is pretty huge news in that universe and while I do hope people stop bothering her over this, I am interested to see how long it takes to get out there into the public sphere and in what form that occurs.
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Re: Christine & Kate Plays Christine (Campos / Greene, 2016)

#22 Post by CSM126 » Wed Sep 28, 2016 12:46 pm

Holy crap that looks great. Chubbuck's is a fascinating story and this looks like it could do it justice.

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Re: Christine & Kate Plays Christine (Campos / Greene, 2016)

#23 Post by oh yeah » Wed Sep 28, 2016 6:52 pm

That really does look quite good. It certainly seems like it may be a breakthrough for Campos, whose Afterschool I admired the ambition of despite being amateur-Haneke/Kubrick, and whose Simon Killer I seem to be the only fan of, albeit I agree with a lot of the criticisms. This one looks like less of a "look at me" experiment in aestheticism, which is nice because we have enough of those.

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Re: Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016)

#24 Post by mfunk9786 » Thu Oct 27, 2016 11:04 am

MOD NOTE: Having seen both films, I think there's absolutely a correlation between them inherent in the subject matter, but I think it's unfair to both filmmakers and to the discourse about both films to inextricably link them. They are parallel, not perpendicular. Going against my better organizational sense, I think it makes more logical sense to separate them here. Apologies for any current or future confusion.
Cronenfly wrote:As for the Campos: he drops his Haneke Jr. shtick here, but doesn't replace it with much else, stylistically or narratively speaking. If anything, it is a shockingly conventional biopic, given the explosiveness of the material. Hall is naturally quite good (once you get past the strange accent/intonation, which I assume is modelled on the real Chubbuck), but I do not expect this to make that much noise when released, and any awards traction seems doubtful to me.
I'm really glad that Campos saw fit to drop that cold, clinical approach. Perhaps the greatest feat Christine achieves from a direction standpoint is capturing sort of a shabby, modest, unremarkable setting and tone. This isn't an event that occurred with a lot of moody fanfare, it happened during a local news broadcast in Sarasota, FL. Managing to get the sense of place and time so right without needing to inject some sort of heavy mood, especially considering what ultimately happens to Chubbuck, felt like the right approach to me. You're probably right about awards traction, but even though the film isn't exactly lighting the world on fire overall (though I did find it to be very, very good on the whole and about as fair a trial as making a film about this subject matter is going to get), Rebecca Hall's performance is what makes this essential. I'm sure this will send Domino very far away from it, but it has a good deal in common with the great work that Elisabeth Moss did in last year's Queen of Earth, without any of that film's efforts to ratchet up the intensity of the character's mental illness - Hall plays Chubbuck the way she should be played, like a difficult but smart, kind person who is very clearly dealing with mental and emotional demons but wants badly not to have them define her. The depiction of depression is far more Melancholia than Requiem for a Dream, and for that we can all be grateful. I recommend this one to anyone who's curious.

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Re: Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016)

#25 Post by FrauBlucher » Fri Nov 04, 2016 7:16 am

mfunk9786 wrote:Perhaps the greatest feat Christine achieves from a direction standpoint is capturing sort of a shabby, modest, unremarkable setting and tone. This isn't an event that occurred with a lot of moody fanfare, it happened during a local news broadcast in Sarasota, FL. Managing to get the sense of place and time so right without needing to inject some sort of heavy mood, especially considering what ultimately happens to Chubbuck, felt like the right approach to me.
I couldn't agree more.

Rebecca Hall was outstanding. Her portrayal made this riveting. She simmered to a boil. Even if you didn't know what the outcome of the real Christine Chubbuck's life was, you knew that something bad was going to happen. Hall's performance needs to have a wider audience. Hopefully, she'll get it.

As someone who lived through that part of 70's, Campos was spot on with the style and sensiblites of that period. Nothing over the top here, thankfully. And there was some great musical choices as well. I loved hearing Alive and Kicking's "Tighter Tighter." A band I've seen a number of times playing the Brooklyn bar scene.

It will be interesting to see what happens at award season.

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