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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.
Just finished red letter media’s half in the bag 2022 catch up and now I want to see white lotus season 2, The Menu, and Triangle of Sadness.
all three of these are great. You might also like White Noise.
Knock at the Cabin is brilliant guys. It is M. Night Shyamalan’s best film since The Village. It is so visceral. It’s so tense, it really sucks you into the movie. Dave Bautista and Jonathan Groff give beautiful performances, and the score is just pitch perfect. It’s hard not to see this being one of my favorite films of the year.
Edit:
I’m just gonna add one more movie.
Empire of Light
Not exactly a This Had Oscar Buzz movie since it got a (well deserved) nomination for Cinematography. But it is a movie that had huge Oscar buzz and then just died out when it premiered to mixed-negative reviews. I actually like Sam Mendes as a director. Skyfall is the best Bond film (although he also made Spectre which is one of the worst), and I love 1917 and Revolutionary Road.
This is his first solo writing credit, and you can feel that in some places. This would have benefitted from him hiring a co-writer like he did with 1917. But, even though it’s uneven especially in the middle, I still really like it. The last 30 minutes I think are fucking fantastic. There’s a sequence in it that’s intense and so well-made.
It’s not one of his best movies, but it’s not nearly as bad as the reception makes it seem. Richard Lawson, critic for Vanity Fair, loved the film. I don’t think it’s as good as he seems to think it is, but I think his review highlights a lot of the stuff the film does right.
I'm trying to get past this, but having a hard time. I don't want to get too argumentative about it, so I'll just ask: did you like The Village? It was on my "top ten worst movies made by good directors" list for a long time.
Yes I do. And I’m not alone. Just look at the most popular reviews for it on Letterboxd. It used to be the consensus on the internet in the late 00s and early 10s that the film was terrible and it was what started the demise of Shyamalan. But it’s gone through a re-evaluation since a couple of years ago. There’s been a couple of articles written about how it was just misunderstood at the time. A consensus is that it was marketed as a horror movie and instead audiences got a romance, so that expectation is what made people sour on the movie.
I think it’s Shyamalan’s masterpiece. It is such a gorgeous looking movie, it has an incredible score, and dynamic performances, and it’s incredibly romantic. It is filmmaking at its finest, and I was invested in the characters and the love story from beginning to end..
I was about 4 years old when it came out, and I didn’t watch it until two years ago, but I went into it already knowing the twist. I went into it already knowing that it’s not really a horror movie. And I think that allowed me to enjoy it a lot more than audiences at the time.
Maybe I'll have to give it another shot at some point. I haven't watched it since it came out, when I saw it in theatres on the opening weekend. I agree that there are a lot of parts of it that are excellent as you say; it is gorgeous looking (Roger Deakins cinematography!), it has a great score, there are fantastic performances . I just think the story was bad and the twist was obvious. Perhaps it's because almost every Shyamalan movie has some kind of twist, and as the article you linked says, we expect things to follow a certain progression because of how he has made other movies.
I think that the concensus that it was marketed as a horror movie and it was a romance movie so expectations were set... is inaccurate. It was definitely marketed as a Shyamalan movie, and it certainly is a Shyamalan movie. I didn't expect it to actually be scary - I expected something similar to the Shyamalan movies that came before, and I think everyone else did too. Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs - they weren't horror movies (well, maybe Signs, which is clearly about demons attacking) - they were well paced, thoughtful movies that built up a story, where everything was crafted to point you towards a revelation (I think that's better than "twist") that changes how you think about the movie. This movie did not have a revelation that changed your point of view, and that's what most of us didn't like. I think that if you take away that expectation, then the movie might be fine; if you don't go in looking for revelation, you don't get disappointed when there isn't one.
This is a fun little pic that would make for a nice double feature with The King of Comedy.. well, not really, but the theme is similar.
George Cukor is a phenomenal director. I love Holiday, Gaslight, and My Fair Lady as well (he also was one of the uncredited directors of both Gone with the Wind and Wizard of Oz).
yeah, Cukor had a remarkable career. If you haven't seen it, this movie is great.