I LOVE this book (Pollock's follow-up The Heavenly Table might even be better) and I've been waiting impatiently for this to drop since looking through Pattinson's filmography on wiki sometime last year and saw they were making this a movie.

Don't know much about the director but it's an absolutely stacked cast.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIzazUv2gtI

I'm very excited.

They removed the humor entirely, making it instead just a sea of gravely serious nihilism. As I said on Twitter, imagine In Bruges if they cut all the jokes and instead took everything that happened insanely seriously. Not great!

Also, Holland is in over his head in this role. Pattinson and Stan did really well, but Holland just doesn't have the gravitas to hang with these other actors imo.

I really hope they don’t fuck it up tho. I absolutely loved the book. All of Pollock’s stuff is great. September 16th is right around the corner!!

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*spoilers below*

I was interested in how they were going to fit everything in, and I shouldn't have been surprised a lot was left out. Both of Pollock's novels have several plot lines filled with unaffiliated characters that finally cross paths in the third act. I think for this story in particular it would have been better suited for a 4 part mini-series, telling the following stories:

1. Willard coming home from the war, meeting Charlotte, raising Arvin and eventually killing himself after Charlotte's death
2. Sandy & Carl's series of murders (I wish this got more attention in the movie) and Roy & Theodore on the run after Roy kill's Lenora's mother
3. Arvin growing up with his grandmother, uncle and Lenora. Teagardin impregnating Lenora and Lenora killing herself
4. Arvin stalking and eventually killing Teagardin, Sandy & Carl's final "trip" before picking up and killing Roy, picking up and getting killed by Arvin, and Arvin and Lee's showdown.

I was entertained though. Pattinson was great, as you've probably already heard plenty from critics. Really cool that they got Pollock to narrate.

Idc if that was the book’s author narrating, shit was extremely clunky and unnecessary

I think between the music, the narration, the dialogue, most of the performances and the general pace it's clear this was intended to be funnier than it is, which now that I'm reading this thread it seems some people expected whereas I came in expecting something out of the Aster/Eggers school of ever encroaching doom.


It has that element to it, but it also thinks certain things are funny that it doesn't portray as funny - you can tell when they show Carl straddling the GI with his mutilated crotch it's meant to be funny - and so you're just left with this weird feeling... "all the time" that doesn't feel decisive.


That weird feeling is compounded more by the fact that the photography is pretty damn good and Campos does a good job of showing without telling...except then there's the narrator that comes out and tells, right? So what's all that about?

I thought the film negatives were a really cool touch.


More than anything this movie just made me reflect back on the sort of movies I'd be so excited to walk up the hill to the local non-profit theater and drop $10 for a ticket, buy a couple $7 local IPAs and a bag of popcorn and see what happens. Then walk out of the theater thinking, well, I wish I liked that a little more than I did.


The stunt casting of the Marvel showdown at the end was film nerd funny. I thought Holland was good in this, there were just too many characters in a movie that was a little more dark than it needed to be, and that darkness is something Keough, Pattinson, Clarke and Skarsgärd are a little more comfortable in so he seems outshined. I admire he took this left so quickly even if he is ultimately just kind of Angry Peter Parker due to not having a wide enough body of work.


I think the idea that this would've been better as a mini-series is pretty accurate. It's so dense, and the first 45 minutes especially just feel like a prologue episode to a longer story. And the turn from pregnant sister to Pattinson's death...it just feels like the characters know what's going on because the audience does but it's way too circumstantial what's actually on screen.

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