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Midweek Movie Free Talk
Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.
Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.
Was very pleasantly surprised by Puss in Boots yesterday. Watched it for my sister's birthday and was expecting a shameless, soulless cash grab. But I saw a lot of heart and a lot of interesting creative choices made. I definitely wasn't expecting a kid's movie to tackle heavy topics like existential dread, but it did it accessibly and without even being too hamfisted.
Kinda interesting to contrast it to Avatar that I saw this weekend. That movie was very technically impressive but the story felt like a huge rehash of the first movie with 3 other unfinished movies (misunderstood child befriends misunderstood creature, mysterious child discovers they have mysterious powers, refugee family learns how to fit in a new culture and new way of life) layered very lightly on top and mixed in.
A lot of the characters were watered down or never developed and Jake seems to have forgotten all the lessons he learned from the last movie in the first 5 minutes of this one. Actually just about everyone seems to have forgotten almost everything from the last movie, they've even forgotten the enormous unobtanium deposit from the last movie for a new unobtanium that's actually way less profitable. There's a lot of pretty hamfisted emotional gut punches that never landed because the characters are never developed or were only brought into existence for that specific purpose and then are immediately discarded after. This world and these characters are James Cameron's passion project so it was kinda weird to see so little passion. At least outside of VFX, it's gorgeous and dripping with visual detail.
I watched Glass Onion the other night since it is now on Netflix. Didn't feel as clever or tight as Knives Out, and the final hour kind of dragged in my opinion. Still enjoyable enough due to the great cast, and I do hope Rian Johnson makes another one of these if he's up to it.
So I saw Babylon.
It’s fantastic. It’s gorgeously made. Everything is lush. The energy of the first hour of the film is like a crazy ride. Things slow down, eventually, but it is overall a pretty fun ride. Before the ending, which is a bit of a downer.
If I had to explain it it’s like an R-rated non-musical version of Singing in the Rain. Margot’s great in it, there’s some discourse surrounding her at the moment. Due to all her movies bombing, and also some people criticizing her ability to act and that she just does the same Jersey accent for every film. I don’t pay attention to any of that. There will always be backlash to it girls. From Anne Hathaway to Jennifer Lawrence. It’s physics, it’s inevitable. Eventually people will turn on Florence Pugh. Robbie is a brilliant actress, and she fits this role perfectly. Brad Pitt is also great in it. I think this is a perfectly cast movie.
My biggest gripes would be 1: the score. It’s a great score overall. But there are too many pieces that sound like La La Land. I’m not sure if that’s intentional or not but it’s a bit disappointing that we didn’t get an independent sound in that regard. And 2: that ending is a little weird. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say what happens at the end, because it largely has nothing to do with the story, but I’ll cover it.
Babylon Ending
The ending goes through a montage of a bunch of different classic films. And then it goes on to show modern movies like Matrix and Avatar. It then cuts back and forth between Red, Green, and Blue in a way that might cause seizures if you’re epileptic. Weird way to end it, did not need that.
Both this and The Whale have taught me that if a movie has even a slight chance of being polarizing, it’s going to have, at most, a 65% on RottenTomatoes from now on. The score has changed on RT but at the time Wolf of Wall Street had an RT score in the 70s. Green Book, again at the time, had an RT score in the 80s. The Revenant, which I can actually link to since the score hasn’t changed all that much, was incredibly polarizing among critics and that still ended up above certified fresh. And here’s Babylon, with an RT score in the 50s. Even five years ago, both it and The Whale would have RT scores above certified fresh. Maybe not much higher than that, but it’s a world of difference between a 55 and a 75. Same goes for Metacritic, both films are considered “mixed” but they would have been easily in the green a couple of years ago.
I don’t know what’s happened among film critics since then, but it is weird to see a movie of this caliber get rotten on RT.