The Last Duel (2021) (1 Viewer)

[benbess]

Ridley Scott Blames Millennials for ‘The Last Duel’ Box Office Failure

On Marc Maron's podcast 'WTF,' 'The Last Duel' director Ridley Scott blamed his film's box office failure on millennial audiences.

variety.com

"Ridley Scott Blames Millennials for ‘The Last Duel’ Box Office Failure

....Ridley Scott doesn’t have “one regret” about his direction or Disney’s promotion of his 2021 historical drama “The Last Duel” — the box office failure is the fault of young people and their cellphones, he says.....the film Scott directed from a screenplay by Nicole Holofcener, Ben Affleck, and Matt Damon, based on Eric Jager’s book of the same name, only made $27 million worldwide despite carrying a $100 million budget.

....“I think what it boils down to — what we’ve got today [are] the audiences who were brought up on these [curse word] cell phones. The millennian do not ever want to be taught anything unless you are told it on the cell phone,” Scott continued....

“The Last Duel” isn’t the only box office flop Scott blames others for. “[In 1982], I made a film called ‘Blade Runner.’ It was my third movie. Pretty [curse word] good,” he told Maron. “I was killed. I was killed by [film critic] Pauline Kael, who didn’t even meet me. She had never met me and I suddenly read this article in the New Yorker, which is a very classy magazine. I read it, and there’s a four page series of insults. I framed it. It’s in my office right now.” “I never read criticism. I never read critics ever again,” Scott added, “because she was so wrong. I was just way ahead of her.”

 

[benbess]

It's interesting that Ridley Scott in 2021 is still blaming Pauline Kael for the weak box office of Blade Runner in 1982. And he's seemingly upset she didn't meet him before writing a critical review?? As he says, The New Yorker is a classy magazine, and somewhat intellectual. How could a review in such a place single-handedly bring a movie down? It doesn't make sense. I loved reading Pauline Kael's movie reviews back in the 80s and 90s in the New Yorker, and her reviews from the 60s and 70s, collected in her books, are also still worth reading. I often disagree with Kael, but her reviews are wonderfully written and insightful. Here's a link and some quotes in case any one is curious. To me this review is like a sophisticated version of an "honest trailer," just done Kael-style....

“Blade Runner,” Reviewed

Pauline Kael’s 1982 review of Ridley Scott’s futuristic thriller “Blade Runner,” starring Harrison Ford.

www.newyorker.com

"....The congested-megalopolis sets are extraordinary, and they’re lovingly, perhaps obsessively, detailed; this is the future as a black market, made up of scrambled sordid aspects of the past—Chinatown, the Casbah, and Times Square, with an enormous, mesmerizing ad for Coca-Cola, and Art Deco neon signs everywhere, in a blur of languages. “Blade Runner,” which cost thirty million dollars, has its own look, and a visionary sci-fi movie that has its own look can’t be ignored—it has its place in film history. But we’re always aware of the sets as sets, partly because although the impasto of decay is fascinating, what we see doesn’t mean anything to us. (It’s 2019 back lot.) Ridley Scott isn’t great on mise en scène—we’re never sure exactly what part of the city we’re in, or where it is in relation to the scene before and the scene after. (Scott seems to be trapped in his own alleyways, without a map.)....

Scott’s creepy, oppressive vision requires some sort of overriding idea—something besides spoofy gimmicks, such as having Deckard narrate the movie in the loner-in-the-big-city manner of a Hammett or Chandler private eye. This voice-over, which is said to have been a late addition, sounds ludicrous, and it breaks the visual hold of the material. The dialogue isn’t well handled, either. Scott doesn’t seem to have a grasp of how to use words as part of the way a movie moves. “Blade Runner” is a suspenseless thriller; it appears to be a victim of its own imaginative use of hardware and miniatures and mattes. At some point, Scott and the others must have decided that the story was unimportant; maybe the booming, lewd and sultry score by Chariots-for-Hire Vangelis that seems to come out of the smoke convinced them that the audience would be moved even if vital parts of the story were trimmed. Vangelis gives the picture so much film noir overload that he fights Scott’s imagery; he chomps on it, stomps on it, and drowns it....

All we’ve got to hang on to is Deckard, and the moviemakers seem to have decided that his characterization was complete when they signed Harrison Ford for the role. Deckard’s bachelor pad is part of a 1924 Frank Lloyd Wright house with a Mayan motif. Apart from that, the only things we learn about him are that he has inexplicably latched on to private-eye lingo, that he was married, and that he’s tired of killing replicants—it has begun to sicken him.....in the one really shocking and magical sequence, Daryl Hannah, as the straw-haired, acrobatic Pris, does a punk variation on Olympia, the doll automaton of “The Tales of Hoffmann.”

....But this replicant-detector test comes at the beginning of the picture, before we have registered that replicants have no early life. And it seems utterly pointless, since surely the Tyrell Corporation has photographic records of the models it has produced—and, in fact, when the police order Deckard to find and retire the four he is shown perfectly clear pictures of them. It might have been much cannier to save any testing until later in the movie, when Deckard has doubts about a very beautiful dark-eyed woman—Tyrell’s assistant, Rachael, played by Sean Young. Rachael, who has the eyes of an old Murine ad, seems more of a zombie than anyone else in the movie, because the director tries to pose her the way von Sternberg posed Dietrich, but she saves Deckard’s life, and even plays his piano. (She smokes, too, but then the whole atmosphere is smoking.) Rachael wears vamped-up versions of the mannish padded-shoulder suits and the sleek, stiff hairdos and ultra-glossy lipstick of career girls in forties movies; her shoulder comes into a room a long time before she does. And if Deckard had felt compelled to test her responses it could have been the occasion for some nifty repartee; she might have been spirited and touching. Her role is limply written, though; she’s cool at first, but she spends most of her screen time looking mysteriously afflicted—wet-eyed with yearning—and she never gets to deliver a zinger.....

The only character who gets to display a large range of emotions is the fourth of the killer replicants, and their leader—Roy Batty (the Crazed King?), played by the tall, blue-eyed blond Dutch actor Rutger Hauer, whose hair is lemon-white here. Hauer (who was Albert Speer in “Inside the Third Reich” on television last May) stares all the time; he also smiles ominously, hoo-hoos like a mad owl and howls like a wolf, and, at moments, appears to see himself as the god Pan, and as Christ crucified. He seems a shoo-in for this year’s Klaus Kinski Scenery-Chewing Award. As a humanoid in a homicidal rage because replicants are built to last only four years, he stalks through the movie like an evil Aryan superman; he brings the wrong kind of intensity to the role—an effete, self-aware irony so overscaled it’s Wagnerian. His gaga performance is an unconscious burlesque that apparently passes for great acting with the director, especially when Hauer turns noble sufferer and poses like a big hunk of sculpture. (It’s a wonder he doesn’t rust out in all that rain.) This sequence is particularly funny because there’s poor Harrison Ford, with the fingers of one hand broken, reduced to hanging on to bits of the cornice of a tall building by his one good hand—by then you’ve probably forgotten that he is Harrison Ford, the fellow who charms audiences by his boundless good humor—while the saucer-eyed Hauer rants and carries on. Ford is like Harold Lloyd stuck by mistake in the climax of “Duel in the Sun.”

....“Blade Runner” is musty even while you’re looking at it (and noting its relationship to Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” and to von Sternberg’s lighting techniques, and maybe to Polanski’s “Chinatown” and “Fellini’s Roma,” and so on). There are some remarkable images—for example, when the camera plays over the iron grillwork of the famous Bradbury Building in Los Angeles the iron looks tortured into shape. These images are part of the sequences about a lonely, sickly young toymaker, Sebastian (William Sanderson), who lives in the deserted building. Sebastian has used the same techniques employed in producing replicants to make living toy companions for himself, and since the first appearance of these toys has some charm, we wait to see them in action again. When the innocent, friendly Sebastian is in danger, we expect the toys to come to his aid or be upset or, later, try to take reprisals for what happens to their creator, or at least grieve. We assume that moviemakers wouldn’t go to all the trouble of devising a whole batch of toy figures only to forget about them. But this movie loses track of the few expectations it sets up, and the formlessness adds to a viewer’s demoralization—the film itself seems part of the atmosphere of decay. “Blade Runner” has nothing to give the audience—not even a second of sorrow for Sebastian. It hasn’t been thought out in human terms. If anybody comes around with a test to detect humanoids, maybe Ridley Scott and his associates should hide. With all the smoke in this movie, you feel as if everyone connected with it needs to have his flue cleaned."

 

[Jeffrey D]

Off topic, but my brief thought about Blade Runner is I was bored stiff watching it, but it was years ago. I don’t know if I’ll give it another chance.

 

[TravisR]

Ridley Scott Blames Millennials for ‘The Last Duel’ Box Office Failure

On Marc Maron's podcast 'WTF,' 'The Last Duel' director Ridley Scott blamed his film's box office failure on millennial audiences.

variety.com

"Ridley Scott Blames Millennials for ‘The Last Duel’ Box Office Failure


....“I think what it boils down to — what we’ve got today [are] the audiences who were brought up on these [curse word] cell phones. The millennian do not ever want to be taught anything unless you are told it on the cell phone,” Scott continued....

I mean I think there's some truth to the "kids today" being addicted to cell phones but that doesn't account for everyone else that isn't a millennial that didn't see it either.

 

[SamT]

Blade Runner is a masterpiece but this could be a dud, I don't know. They did a very poor job of promoting it. I visit here reguraly and even I wasn't complelty aware of this movie.

 

[TravisR]

^I've heard it's actually pretty good. Personally, I think Ridley Scott is the most overrated director in history and the medieval setting never catches my attention so even being a fan of most of the actors in the movie, this wasn't a movie for me.

 

[Capt D McMars]

At the end of the day, really it’s your personal experience our interaction with the movie itself. Placing too much power in the hands of others to tell you what you do or do not like or will or will not like, takes away the power from you as a movie viewer.
For me, I’d like to go into a movie with as little information as possible if the movie itself peaks my interest. This way I am not influenced by the opinions of others, and I’m able to make my own opinions and draw my own conclusions as to whether I personally enjoyed it or not. Millennials, baby boomers, Gen X GEN Y… Should be irrelevant, and seems to be nothing but an excuse as to why a Projects failed or was successful. In the end it’s each and everyone of our own personal experiences and the time in which we saw it that determines our observations and how we interacted with that particular film. Sometimes going back later, even years later may change that interaction between you and the film. Time does make a difference, And sometimes just sometimes a Movie needs a second chance.

 

[Sam Favate]

I am so over Ridley Scott.

 

[Capt D McMars]

At the end of the day, really it’s your personal experience our interaction with the movie itself. Placing too much power in the hands of others to tell you what you do or do not like or will or will not like, takes away the power from you as a movie viewer.
For me, I’d like to go into a movie with as little information as possible if the movie itself peaks my interest. This way I am not influenced by the opinions of others, and I’m able to make my own opinions and draw my own conclusions as to whether I personally enjoyed it or not. Millennials, baby boomers, Gen X GEN Y… Should be irrelevant, and seems to be nothing but an excuse as to why a Projects failed or was successful. In the end it’s each and everyone of our own personal experiences and the time in which we saw it that determines our observations and how we interacted with that particular film. Sometimes going back later, even years later may change that interaction between you and the film. Time does make a difference, And sometimes just sometimes a Movie needs a second chance.

just an edendum to my comments, many films that were an inistial flop have achieved cult statis years and even decades later. Forbidden Planet for example was a boxoffice failure, yet today it is helralded as a Sci-Fi pioneer film, with it's abstract soundtrack and special effects...time wiill tell!!

 

[SamT]

Hope this is good. I love medieval movies. If it's about the bigger picture, the struggle to gain power, try to rule over others. The struggle between the old and new ideas, religion. Nothing is more relevant to today than this.

 

[Malcolm R]

Blade Runner is a masterpiece but this could be a dud, I don't know. They did a very poor job of promoting it. I visit here reguraly and even I wasn't complelty aware of this movie.

Depends on where you look, I guess. I saw endless commercials for this film on TV over several weeks prior to its release, as I was watching sports and horror movies on cable.

You and Mike Frezon must hang out in the same places. He said he'd heard absolutely nothing about the biggest film of the year, Marvel's "Shang Chi", until it showed up on his blu-ray new release list last week.

 

[Capt D McMars]

Hope this is good. I love medieval movies. If it's about the bigger picture, the struggle to gain power, try to rule over others. The struggle between the old and new ideas, religion. Nothing is more relevant to today than this.

The times may change, but people will always be people, lol!

 

[TonyD]

Depends on where you look, I guess. I saw endless commercials for this film on TV over several weeks prior to its release, as I was watching sports and horror movies on cable.

You and Mike Frezon must hang out in the same places. He said he'd heard absolutely nothing about the biggest film of the year, Marvel's "Shang Chi", until it showed up on his blu-ray new release list last week.

I couldn’t get away from the spot for Duel. I tried.

Shang Chi too but that one I was looking forward to see.

How anyone didn’t see ads for Shang Chin is unfathomable to me.

 

[Capt D McMars]

I couldn’t get away from the spot for Duel. I tried.

Shang Chi too but that one I was looking forward to see.

How anyone didn’t see ads for Shang Chin is unfathomable to me.

Well for me, I have limited exposure to commercials because I have Roku and commercial-less viewing, on platforms like Hulu, Amazin Prime, ect- so I am sure there are others like me that weren't exposed to theonslaught of "free TV" and the flood of commercials prone to that medium.

 

[JoeStemme]

As to LAST DUEL - it's quite good. Too bad it coulnd't find an audience.

The reason Ridley Scott mentions (not) meeting Kael is that she was legendary for getting chummy with filmmakers. DePalma reaped the benefits of playing footsie with her for years and years. She got so close to Warren Beatty he even hired her. Scott must have known her rep.

 

[SamT]

Watched it. This was very average at best. The story might be interesting but the execution was poor. They show the same story from different vantage points but one of the problems is that instead of being interesting, sometimes they repeat the exact same thing several times with no new information which gets tiring real fast.

 

[Josh Dial]

Watched it. This was very average at best. The story might be interesting but the execution was poor. They show the same story from different vantage points but one of the problems is that instead of being interesting, sometimes they repeat the exact same thing several times with no new information which gets tiring real fast.

The exact same thing? With no new information? I don't think that happened a single time.

 

[SamT]

I said sometimes. Some scenes were the same overall. no new information.

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

I did not make it to a theater to see this. Watched on Blu-ray and enjoyed it. It is basically Rashomon. We get three segments telling us the "truth" of what happened from different perspectives. So, you do sort of see the same story play out three times each time slightly altered to the perspective of the person whose perspective we are seeing. It is not the exact same story each time because things are altered and show more of what each player was thinking leading up to and during the incident.

The incident is the alleged rape of Comer's character who is married to the Damon character and Driver plays the supposed friend of Damon that commits the act. It is revealed right at the start that these characters do not agree on what happened and they all have motives of their own driving what happens.

So, on the good side it is a beautiful looking picture. Scott nails the look and feel of everything. At this stage I feel like he can do these period films in his sleep. There is a special feature on the disc about the making of the film and to me it shows how amazing Ridley is at putting these films together. The man is a wonder.

The story is, as stated above, essentially Rashomon with the central theme being played up how helpless women were in the period in which this was set. They were controlled and essentially treated as property of men by everyone from the church to the ruling class, to other women who thought a woman foolish to standup for herself. Rape was not really a thing as a man, particularly any man of means, could have his way with a woman anytime he wanted and her best course of action was to accept this. If she were to complain and could not prove her case, her fate was to be stripped and chained to a post and then burned alive. So, really the best option was not to speak up. Comer's character does and hence the movie shows us the three takes on the truth.

It is called The Last Duel because if the crime could not be proven then "god" would decide who was telling the truth by having the two men involved (Damon and Driver) fight to the death...whomever lived was telling the truth. The woman as property is chained to a post to watch to find out what her fate will be. Stripped and burned if her husband loses. Blessed by god as telling the truth if her husband kills the accused rapist.

Overall, a fairly simple story with the stakes laid out right in the first seconds of the film. It opens with the beginning of the duel and then goes to the three flashbacks as the body of the film before we return to see the conclusion of the duel.

I will say Scott does a great job telling this one...

Spoiler: SPOILER

I actually reflexively fist pumped at the conclusion without knowing I was doing so, which was pretty funny.

Photography, sets, costumes, the supporting cast are all wonderful. He did get me sucked into the story. I can find no fault with the execution of the film. It all works. The cast is so-so. I would not have cast Damon and Affleck they, to me, don't really work here. Affleck is playing an asshole but in this period setting he seems very out of place and it turns his performance a bit goofy. Damon looks a bit ridiculous in his mullet and also does not work as a savage medieval knight. I found his performance a bit annoying and somewhat more distracting than Affleck but Affleck plays a smaller role. Driver does the best here of the main players and his role actually gets better as the film progresses. The drag on this film is the cast and probably just recasting Damon and Affleck would have greatly improved this for me.

Worth watching for Scott fans and fans of period films. Nice medieval battle scenes that look and sound fantastic. The final duel is beautifully staged and shot and is a great climax to the film. Scott is a master and proves it yet again.

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

....“I think what it boils down to — what we’ve got today [are] the audiences who were brought up on these [curse word] cell phones. The millennian do not ever want to be taught anything unless you are told it on the cell phone,” Scott continued....

On this bit about Scott going after millennials, yeah, not sure that their cell phones were involved. I do think the issue is the picture was not the sort of film that mass audiences are that interested in anymore.

In the "old days" one of the things they would use to carry a picture like this was stars, yes, movie stars, that at the time brought people into a cinema and allowed you to make a picture about whatever subject you wanted to make it about. So, you could do a huge period film and put stars in the leads and people would come to see it. As a side note I realize in the 1960s period epics were not the draw they once were.

While Damon, Affleck, and Driver are known actors the truth is none of them are "stars" meaning their presence in a film does not bring a big audience to a theater. The fact is, there really are pretty much no such thing as movie stars anymore with maybe a couple exceptions. Leo Dicaprio appears to be able to headline pictures that are not franchise or comic book films and get them made and every agent working wants their clients to appear in a picture with Leo. That's what a star used to be able to do. He seems like the last one. I don't know how much longer that will continue though. He's in a giant budget Scorsese film that is upcoming but apparently is not the lead in the film now as Jesse Plemons was shifted into that part and DiCaprio is playing one of the villains.

The Last Duel is not lit up by star power. I don't know Comer and I have to look her up to see if I have seen anything with her in it aside from this. I know she is playing Josephine in Scott's upcoming Napoleon picture but other than that, honestly, I've never heard of her and I would guess I am not alone in that.

I would also say, despite what Scott says, the trailers for The Last Duel were not great. I think that Damon and Affleck look goofy in the trailers and basically they look goofy in the film. You can get by that watching the film as the story is well told so if you are sucked in by it you can look past those two actors. However, in a couple minutes of trailer that probably does not help generate interest.

I honestly just don't think millennials are into this kind of picture. I would base that on what type of pictures are popular with them at the box office.

It's funny because while this is set in medieval times the story is about women's rights, which makes it timely as we do have states removing women's rights at this point in our history. This probably would be an aspect of the story that would appeal to millennials if you could get them to see it. However, the two central male characters in the story (Damon and Driver) I am fairly certain millennials would find repulsive.

This would probably be an issue for them because one thing millennials seem pretty horrible at is contextualizing events. Instead they just seem to judge them based on the world they live in. I think that would make the best outcome for the Comer character, in their perspective, death. Mainly because if her husband wins the duel, she would have to go back and live with the thug. She would, after all, in those times remain his property to do with as he chooses.

Paul Thomas Anderson's new film is being harshly judged by some younger critics based on things they find offensive. OK, this is fine. Everybody is entitled to be offended. Everybody is entitled to take what they want out of a piece of fiction. I think where that goes too far is when some of these younger critics take the piece of fiction and use it to smear Anderson...as if he is some sort of child molester. This to me is pretty out of line and shows some strange disconnect in people that do this that demonstrates they don't really comprehend artistic license nor creativity in general.

I think if what Scott means about millennials is they learn from their phones because they use their phones to constantly traffic in social media nonsense he probably has a point. He likely just did not phrase it well. I think social media is in part how they come to judge the world primarily only in the context of their own lifetimes. So, if they watched The Last Duel would they be focused on the story and when it is set and what that all means or would they be focused on the "offensive" characters that do not behave as they expect people now to behave?

The truth is I don't know but I can say if you want to make films for millennials, Ridley, look at what is popular with them.