The Long Notes
Films made too soon, greatness, and style versus substance.
I spend a lot of time thinking about movies in ways that never fully fit inside my regular posts.
Like halfway formed ideas. Dumb theories. Questions I keep changing my mind about every six months or so. Stuff I notice while watching movies at 1am and then I open 15 tabs because my brain refuses to let the though go.
Sometimes it’s about why certain films age in strange ways. Or why some directors are “important” without actually moving me that much. And sometimes it’s even more useless than that. Like me spending 20 minutes wondering why double features are spiritually correct together even when the films have nothing in common on paper.
Anyway, this series is basically going to be my notebook. Less polishes and more messy, more conversational. Just me trying to figure out what I actually believe about cinema while I’m writing.
Which means you can expect me to contradict myself from one entry to the next. Fair warning.
Films made too soon / what “aged well” actually means.
“This film was made wayyy too soon.”
I keep reading/hearing this all the time. And it’s usually about movies that got dismissed at release, then came back years later with a different reputation.
But, I don’t know. I’m not even sure “ahead of its time” is the right way to describe whats happening there. These films were not predicting the future or inventing some impossible new cinematic language. The movie itself stays 100% the same, but what changes is the audience or the culture around it, or also, the emotional climate people are watching it through.
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PTA, Paul Thomas Anderson made Magnolia a long time ago, do I think he made this movie way too soon in his career? Do we think a later-career PTA would make a “better” Magnolia? Was the project too ambitious?
I think PTA of today would make a more controlled one. Maybe even a wiser one, more restrained even, but part of what gives Magnolia its charge is precisely that is feels emotionally overextended.
When you compare it to later works like Phantom Thread or The Master, you can feel how much more comfortable PTA becomes with withholding, with silence and ambiguity, with behavioral detail. He no longer underlines emotion as insistently because he’s learned that uncertainty itself can carry emotional force.
Young PTA was more about emotional breakthrough, and I think older PTA seems to be more interested in emotional impasse.
What if he made One Battle After Another 15 years ago? Maybe the film would have been even louder, more eager to prove mastery. I find contemporary PTA to be less interested in virtuosity for its own sake, even though he’s arguably more technically capable now.
There’s also something bittersweet about artists losing certain forms of immaturity. Technical growth can come with emotional compression. Early ambition sometimes produces messiness that later refinement cannot recreate.
I'm thinking of Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures. The film seems to exceed the stabilizing capabilities of its creator. The film is too large, too emotionally overloaded. Its structure is quite instable really. But that instability becomes part of the experience.
A film made “too soon” can preserve an artistic overreach that later mastery would smooth away.
What do you think?!
What even makes someone a “great director”? Do we know the criteria?
I keep changing my answer depending on the week.
Because sometimes I watch a filmmaker with insane technical control and leave the movie feeling basically nothing. Then another dirctor shoots something messy, uneven and flawed in obvious way and I can’t stop thinking about it for days.
So what are we actually rewarding when we call somebody great?
