The mixed response to Emerald Fennell’s 00s-set thriller evinces a movie-going conundrum: how do we assess entertainment that is predominantly indexed on vibes?

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/movies/t/664183

The mixed response to Emerald Fennell’s 00s-set thriller evinces a movie-going conundrum: how do we assess entertainment that is predominantly indexed on vibes? By now, the buzz around Saltburn, Emerald Fennell’s sweaty, lascivious sophomore feature about a middle-class interloper in a vacuously rich family, has begun to settle into two camps. On one side, viewers and the plurality of critics who find the film, which had one of the most successful limited releases this year in the US before expanding nationwide last weekend, to be a flashy, self-satisfied mess of empty provocations. And on the other, those who see Fennell’s remix of Brideshead Revisited and the The Talented Mr Ripley with a dash of mid-aughts Abercrombie & Fitch as a successfully absorbing erotic thriller with titillating shocks. Depraved, but in a fun way, to summarize the predominant sentiment on TikTok.

Everyone agrees that Saltburn, for the most part, looks good – lush, attractive, expensive. (It helps that it stars the Euphoria actor and ascendant screen heartthrob Jacob Elordi.) But are its squirm-inducing visuals – a character slurping another’s cummy bathwater, a literally cocky ending – the mark of perverse genius, or cheap, hollow tricks masquerading as it?..

  • livus
    5•10 months ago

    I’m beginning to feel slightly weirded out that every single post I make to !movies@kbin.social gets reposted here.

    Am I being followed by a bot?

      • livus
        4•10 months ago

        @Blaze Thanks for the reply. Nice to know you’re a human!

        You’ve actually reposted all my posts to movies in the last few days, including an obscure one, so I was really beginning to wonder!

          • livus
            4•10 months ago

            @Blaze Afterthought: I do have a favour to ask, please can you upvote my posts if you like them?

            One of the reasons I thought you were a bot was because you weren’t interacting with me at all over there.

                  • livus
                    2•10 months ago

                    @Blaze thanks for the invite, that’s an interesting idea - but I don’t know if federation currently allows us to cross-moderate between Lemmy and Kbin yet?

                    We should probably decide which community to keep at some point

                    !moviesandtv is obviously the bigger/main community on the threadiverse so definitely it needs to be kept!!!

                    Also everyone already migrated here once after the old instance shut.

                    Kbin is a relatively small instance, but I’m still committed to helping it maintain some basic communities because I think it’s an important aspect as it grows. So I’m thinking for now, keep little !movies going too, maybe lean into theory/art/history type stuff over there a bit more.

                    Back when I was on reddit I used to enjoy both the big movies sub and the much smaller ones like flicks and truefilm, and now that Kbin has multi-communities that seems promising in terms of access.

              • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet
                1•10 months ago

                Is your name a Huey Long reference? I wouldn’t normally think so, but with you being a movie buff, I have to ask.

          • livus
            4•10 months ago

            @Blaze that explains it! I should probably take a leaf out of your book and do more crossposting myself, but at the moment I’m focused on new content.

            Hope you get to watch some of the shortform docos. They’re pretty good.