this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2025
18 points (90.9% liked)

movies

2143 readers
206 users here now

Matrix room: https://matrix.to/#/#fediversefilms:matrix.org

Warning: If the community is empty, make sure you have "English" selected in your languages in your account settings.

🔎 Find discussion threads

A community focused on discussions on movies. Besides usual movie news, the following threads are welcome

Related communities:

Show communities:

Discussion communities:

RULES

Spoilers are strictly forbidden in post titles.

Posts soliciting spoilers (endings, plot elements, twists, etc.) should contain [spoilers] in their title. Comments in these posts do not need to be hidden in spoiler MarkDown if they pertain to the title’s subject matter.

Otherwise, spoilers but must be contained in MarkDown.

2024 discussion threads

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

It has graced tea towels and cushions, mugs and socks, and spawned numerous Instagram accounts and coffee table books galore. Now brutalism, the once-maligned postwar architectural style of chiselled concrete forms, has finally reached Hollywood, in the form of an epic three-and-a-half-hour film that looks set to sweep the Oscars. You would think that architecture fans would be thrilled to have their subject in the limelight for a change. But they are raging.

There is nothing more irritating to enthusiasts than when the mainstream tries to portray their niche world and gets it wrong. And The Brutalist gets an awful lot wrong. Just as Gladiator II recently vexed classicists with its inaccurate portrayal of the emperors and its anachronistic scenes of people reading the newspaper and drinking at cafes (neither of which, apparently, existed at the time), so too has director Brady Corbet riled the architecture world by playing fast and loose with his interpretation of brutalism, the Bauhaus, postwar immigration and the basic process of architecture itself.

While the film world has showered the movie with five-star reviews – praising its heroic ambition, and drooling at the “authenticity” of shooting with hulking 1950s VistaVision cameras – architecture critics have been up in arms. “The Brutalist gets architecture wrong,” declared the Washington Post. It “perpetuates a colossal cliche,” fumed the Financial Times. Three prominent American architecture critics even got together to record a dedicated podcast, titled Why the Brutalist Is a Terrible Movie.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] psyspoop@lemm.ee 1 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

Seems like a classic case of a film relating to a certain topic pissing off people who are really into that topic. The Brutalist with architecture, Black Swan with ballet, all kinds of fighting movies, all kinds of movies with "science-y" topics, etc. At the end of the day, the film isn't a documentary and doesn't need to portray things perfectly, they just need to portray them in a way that allows the story to be told well.