Bloody Nose just bored me, I found very little of it interesting or enjoyable. It just felt like hanging out at some random bar for an hour and a half which I know some people love to do but is my idea of a terrible time. Bottoms is way better.
I also didn’t enjoy Bloody Nose Empty Pockets. I didn’t absolutely hate it or anything, but I found it a mostly uninteresting watch. I did wonder if it’s partly because the pub / bar / culture is pretty different in the UK, and a lot of the positive reviews I read about it were how it tapped into that specific dive culture, which is foreign to me to begin with, so I’m missing something critical while watching it.
I'm sure being in a place like that at least once helps a bit, but limiting the film to just "hanging out at a bar" is underselling it.
Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets really captures the community that a local dive bar can create. Our place for years closed down a few years ago but it was the best place to just go on a random night. Even if you didn't go with people you know you would inevitably run into friends. The bathroom was always questionable and the bartender was always breaking up fights but it was the mythical third place that disappears more and more every day.
Yeah the last part there is part of the reason the movie is so special to me. Setting it during the 2016 election and then having it come out during the COVID lockdowns (coincidentally, obviously) solidifies it. It is a film about doors closing in on people with really nowhere else to go. A local dive announced yesterday that they were closing and, even though I never frequented it, it made me sad. It was a bastion in the neighborhood for about 20 years. All the young kids that used to get in underage grew up and moved to the suburbs to spend their time at cloned breweries or gastro pubs. The neighborhood locals are dying out. Spaces that had character and charm and history are going extinct, and no one really seems to care.
Don't you people generally drink socially a lot more than Americans? That is something that sticks out in British shows and movies a lot.
Seeing the differences in culture was part of the appeal to me, that's not we do it here but I could see why they were about it.
Im sure we do, but the concept of a dive bar is very different / non existent in the UK really. The equivalent would be what we’d call a local, which is the same idea I suppose, but very different kind of bar. I know there’s more to the film than “I recognise this place culturally”, but for a lot of reviews that I read, that seemed to be the (or at least, a) big draw, a depiction of a place that is slowly being lost, and drawing upon memories of times the viewer has been to a place like that. For a very weird comparison, it felt a bit like the time I watched Moneyball. I know the film isn’t just about baseball, but if you know nothing whatsoever about baseball, it’s hard to get anywhere close to it.
Jerry Maguire came up on my project. The movie itself is fine, but so much of the movie I had already experienced through references in other movies and shows. It is hard to imagine anything becoming as quotable these days. Maybe a viral meme? Movies like this, or when I would see posters for Pulp Fiction when I was too young to understand anything about it, seem to be a part of history. Even the bigger blockbusters seem to be gone as soon as they have arrived.
I spent my teens in England and it still reminded me a lot of the pub that used to serve us underaged lol. There was always one old dude in there too who never said a word but always had a pint in hand and was sat at the same table. Pub culture is for sure different than dive bars, but at its core it’s still the local watering hole where people come together. I think the movie still hits at that sense of community and an impending loss of that as well as examining relationships that form and only exist in that space too.
So many of the lines are famous but I had no idea that "help me help you" was from the movie too. The "cute rambunctious kid" archetype is usually really annoying but the kid is actually kind of endearing. No one would ever accuse me of being a Cameron Crowe fan but the family dynamic between those three works really well here.