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The Brutalist
A Complete Unknown
Conclave
Dune: Part Two
Emilia Pérez
I’m Still Here
Nickel Boys
The Substance
Wicked
Showing posts with label The Brutalist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Brutalist. Show all posts
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What's Brutal is the Length
Film: The Brutalist
Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on various players.
Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on various players.
If you are me and you start watching The Brutalist, you take a step back when you hear the name of the main character, Lázsló Tóth (Adrien Brody). For most people, that name doesn’t mean a lot, but for me, there’s an immediate connection. Comedian Don Novello, best known for his character Father Guido Sarducci, wrote a couple of books where he played a character named Lazlo Toth. This version of Lazlo Toth wrote earnest (and ridiculous) letters to companies and famous people. Seeing someone with essentially the same name in a serious movie was a bit jarring.
It took me several days to get through The Brutalist. The version on HBO is truncated only in the sense that instead of a 15-minute intermission, there’s a 1-minute intermission. It’s still more than 200 minutes with the shorter intermission, and that’s a lot to ask from an audience for any film in one sitting. I do wonder about the necessity of the length. Film critic Mark Kermode tends to reference 2001 in a case like this—in that film, Kubrick takes use from the birth of humanity to the birth of a new species in about 2 ½ hours. In The Brutalist, we take nearly 3 ½ hours to look at the story of a fictional architect.
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