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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.
Nude on the Moon
I watched this with a friend the other night. We skipped through parts of the film.
It’s a nudist film about two rocket scientists who travel to the moon, which coincidentally resembles Florida. There they encounter a race of telepathic aliens who appear as almost-nude humans.
The plot is nonexistent, the pacing is terrible, the props and costumes are cheap and half-assed (in multiple senses of the word), the dialogue is meandering and stilted, but man is this film a trip.
Two thumbs down, but it’s worth taking a peek just to experience something different and unusual.
I love how you say almost nothing positive about the film and somehow I really wanna watch it now.
It’s a member of that rarefied club of cinematic spectacles that are so bad that by sheer force of creative will they bend the good-bad spectrum line into a circle and become good.
Heh heh heh
Three Thousand Years of Longing
George Miller’s long awaited follow up to Mad Max Fury Road. I didn’t see it in theaters and I was actually waiting this whole time for it to be on Amazon Prime as Amazon now owns MGM. But it never went up, probably due to licensing issues. Anyways, I went in with low expectations. I liked the trailer but the reviews were mixed.
I actually liked it quite a bit. It’s basically Idris Elba telling stories to Tilda Swinton for the first hour and twenty minutes. And then the rest is a romantic drama between them. It’s visually spectacular. I think it got mixed reviews because people didn’t like the flashbacks, they say it’s meandering, which I’m confused about. It’s supposed to be people sitting around telling stories.
I also re-watched EEAAO. This was the third time I’ve seen it. The first time I liked it, the second time I liked it less, the third time I liked it back to the first time. I’m just trying to figure out what people love about it so much now that it’s sweeping the guilds and winning Best Picture.
I still don’t think it’s the greatest movie ever made or that cinema peaked with it as I’ve seen some people say. And the Rick and Morty humor is still hard for me to swallow.
But I figured out what it is that made people so coo coo for it. It will be the first millennial Best Picture winner in the way Midnight Cowboy was the first Boomer Best Picture winner. EEAAO celebrates the millennial cannon: In The Mood For Love, Pixar, Video Games, Anime, Tarantino, and so on. And it has that nietzsche philosophy that was also very present in Rick and Morty. So millennials are really into that.
I watched Eo tonight and loooooved it.
That sums it up. The film is beautifully shot and the performances are excellent -- and I can only assume that most of them are roughly improvised.
One more comment: the last of the guild awards are happening this weekend:
Writers Guild of America:
Original: EEAAO
Adapted: Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
American Cinema Editors
Dramatic: Top Gun: Maverick
Comedy: EEAAO
American Society of Cinematographers
Feature Film: Bardo or False Chronicle of Handful of Truths
I watched Promising Young Woman. I was impressed - I think that there are a lot of interesting ideas to explore here about power, trauma, feminism, social media, vengeance, and more. It's not a perfect movie, but I think it did a great job at what it set out to do. There are some actors that I really enjoy - Clancy Brown, Laverne Cox, Max Greenfield, Jennifer Coolidge - and some that surprised me, none more than Carey Mulligan, who I have usually found a bit underwhelming in previous performances.
Big Spoilers, including the whole ending, and it probably won't make sense if you haven't watched the movie because I'm not summarizing it.
Right from the beginning, when Adam Brody's character starts helping Carey Mulligan's Cassandra home and then starts taking advantage of her, I was uncomfortable and also immediately rooting for something terrible to be happening to whomever she was counting up in her tally. I actually found myself a bit disappointed that she wasn't doing anything permanent to the men who were attempting to assault her.The scene with the Dean's daughter was distressingly well done, and really hammered home the reality of rape culture. Allison Brie's character having a revelation and sharing the video was well done, and the reveal that Cassandra's boyfriend had witnessed the assault and kept silent about it - and when confronted turned into a complete asshole - was just so disheartening.
But the real shock was when, in the midst of enacting revenge, Cassandra is murdered. I'll admit, it got me; I didn't see it coming, and my stomach turned, and I had to take a short break and return to the movie. It was a real tonal shift, and I was abruptly wondering if it was going to undermine the rest of the movie... but it didn't. It all came together.
Unfortunately after finishing the movie, I went to reddit to see what some of the popular subreddits thought about it, and I was immediately bombarded with posts made by the exact sorts of men that the movie is aimed at talking about; it was a stark way to underline the issues in western society.
Some mild quibbles / nitpicks:
There was a "this is our first text!" moment, which was also coupled with "that's not how scheduled texts work" moment. Personally, I thought this was fine, but I saw many people complain that "texts don't work like that". I think some people can't suspend disbelief for movies that are too close to our own reality; they'll happy watch two wizards fight on boats over a lava river using laser swords and that's fine, but scheduled texts showing that the user is typing is too much. I find myself feeling sad about that.
Bo Burnham's face-heel turn was really abrupt. He was nice, then he was confronted, then he was suddenly verbally abusive. I feel like he could have just held the verbal abuse and been a better character; him saying "then we both won't be doctors you fucking failure" was, in my opinion, not a good choice. He would have been better, more insidious, if the audience had to put together that he was bad, and not have it shoved in our face.
In my head, the lawyer released the video to the public; he has the phone. That wasn't made explicit, but without it being explicit, then we're left with the fact that Cassandra likely gets justice for herself, but doesn't get justice for Nina. However, I'm happy to imagine that because the lawyer with a conscience got the video, it's going to be shared. That said, if that lawyer isn't already disbarred, he probably will be because if he does something with the video, there's going to be problems.
Overall, I thought the movie was a 9 / 10 - a good, dark, smart tale of revenge.
My favorite of 2020. It’s so brilliantly directed, especially the car smashing scene. Smart, slick genre film.
Edit: you know it’s actually funny you point out that criticism you saw on Reddit. Because at the time on twitter people complained that it was too pro-men and Fennell was very deeply problematic. So it’s two different worlds.
It puzzles me that people would think this was too pro-men. Every man of significance with the exception of the father is reprehensible. I'd say that the film isn't particularly feminist either, which is perhaps the issue? Altogether though, I agree - it was smart and slick, made some comments on things that are difficult to comment about, and "got me" with its story. I've already recommended this one to a few people.
I’m curious what you mean by that
Good, deep question. To be clear, the movie is not anti-feminist either, and I was certainly glib when I said it wasn't particularly feminist.
Within: full movie spoilers and rambling about sexual assault and self harm
I think that the concept of feminism is almost orthogonal to the film. In a rape-revenge sort of story, there are a number of tropes that one might expect to be considered explicitly feminist - a woman is raped, but discovers strength, redefines herself and overcomes her trauma, and survives and is stronger. This movie doesn't really do any of that. Nina is raped, drops out of school, and kills herself, which derails Cassie's life. Cassie herself isn't doing anything violent, she's just making douchebags uncomfortable; the revenge aspect is pretty light, and we're mostly left with Cassie trying to deal with Nina's death and she isn't doing it particularly well. In the end, Cassie is murdered by the same man who raped Nina and derailed her life, and we are left with the perpetrators of her murder arrested by the authorities, but we've already had our noses rubbed in the fact that the authorities suck; they mishandled Nina's assault, and didn't believe her. Within the movie, Al has already gotten away with a heinous crime against a woman, and there's no particular closure on his crime against Cassie. Also two of the three people that Cassie confronts before moving on to her revenge plot are women, with the male being the lawyer; only the male gets Cassie's forgiveness.
It's a lot grittier than some other feminist movies and there is precious little advocacy or proselytizing here. I think it's maybe nitpicking to say that for a movie to be explicitly feminist there has to be advocacy of some kind for equality of the sexes, but if that's the definition of what a feminist work is, then I think there isn't a lot of it in Promising Young Woman. Maybe another way to think of it is that the movie is intensely feminist and is pushing forward to understand complicity, patriarchy, and rape culture, and that to move forward past where we're at requires looking strongly at both men and women and their reactions to sexual assault. But I didn't find it to be doing that in a preachy way, but more as a, "look how things are and wouldn't it be better if there wasn't rape and murder" sort of way.