13
votes
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.
I recently saw Andrew Bujalskis Computer Chess from 2013 and it has to be the strangest and most thought provoking film I have seen in a while. It is super niche and likely not appealing for everyone. Shot in black and white with an old vacuum tube camera from the 70s and takes the form of a mockumentary about a computer chess tournament held in a conference hotel in the 80s. But it is even weirder than it sounds as the movie progresses and are constantly going in directions I didn't see coming. And even though it looks like a weird filmmaking art experiment, everything makes sense with what the movie is trying to explore of themes about artificial intelligence and the how computers and humans interact with their respective limitations. My best comparison would be it is a mix of Clerks, Primer and the TV series Halt And Catch Fire.
It can be found on the Criterion Channel.
I love all three of those comparisons!
I finally saw The Super Mario Bros. Movie. My nephews love it, my sister said it was good, but I did not enjoy it at all. I felt the studio influence all over it, especially with the music. Decades of beloved Mario videogame themes to choose from, yet they choose to drag out the same tired pop songs that have already appeared in other major films? "No Sleep Til Brooklyn" just felt entirely out of place, "Holding Out For a Hero" was used much more effectively in Shrek 2, and "Thunderstruck" and "Mr. Blue Sky" were used in Marvel.
Beyond that, it felt like Mario had little agency or heroic presence in his own film. Chris Pratt didn't hit the right note for me voice wise and it seemed weird that they tried to explain the lack of stereotypical accent in-universe yet still had him say "mamma mia!" a whole bunch. The all-star voice cast is yet another legacy of trying to get butts in seats with big names rather than caring about quality character performances. Jack Black did a good job with Bowser, the others ranged from acceptable to sub-par.
Most egregious of all, they promoted Toad to Mario's BFF/companion and completely omitted Yoshi's character? Outrageous. I will not stand for Yoshi erasure, my boy is a national treasure.
I also just saw it, and while I very much DID enjoy it, I can’t argue against any of your criticism. Pratt’s voice-acting did take me out of it several times, mostly from lack of consistency with the 3 or 4 different accents he gave the character.
The music was a real miss for me too. There was a chance for updating a lot of classic songs from the games, but instead it was a random assortment of standard pop songs. None of which felt particularly effective.
The animation itself was quite well done. My only enjoyments out of watching it was from the work an army of animators put into it and Jack Black's performance.
Not sure if you stuck around for the after credit scenes, but Yoshi was teased at the very end surely to be in the next installment.
You've put something in words that I've thought about often.
But I wonder, is the feeling mainly about the camera hardware and cinematography?
This is a problem I have with a lot of new movies too. Like that Prey movie that came out not too long ago, the Predator sequel. I hear people giving so much credit to the movie for how innovative it is and what a breath of fresh air it is for the series... and when I see it all I can think is "gosh, her hair and makeup really stayed perfectly done after falling in that mud pit and fighting with that bear in the river."
When we don't actually see the events of the movie having an effect on the characters in them all sense of suspension of disbelief, all the tension that a scene has, just kind of evaporates and I struggle to care about what's going on because I just see actors, not characters.
I work in the film industry today, also during a writers strike, and I can echo this somewhat. The individual people still have passion for their work, as anyone should in a creative field, but it's more the corporate side of things that never allow that passion to shine in any of their work. Check my account if you're interested for a comment I made recently about my experience on the set of an Amazon original show. That all being said, the art-house and indie filmmaking community is still very alive and I take as much work as I can get from that sector simply because it feels like everyone is allowed to work together to create a collective art.
I watched 3:10 to Yuma (1957) and Day of the Jackal (1973) this week, first time viewing for each.
It ended up being a pretty fun double feature. Some shared themes as well as interesting discordant notes.
Ben Wade and the Jackal are in many ways opposites of one another. Everyone knows Wade's name; no one knows the Jackal's. Wade is happy to trade his freedom for a roll in the hay; the Jackal risks himself for nothing and no one. Wade makes excuses for his crimes; the Jackal has no conscience to be cleared.
These men are shaped by their worlds. In the lawless west, Wade is a force of chaos. He trusts that everything will work out somehow, and goes with the flow. In the modern world of red tape and records, the Jackal is in many ways a monster of bureaucracy. He crosses every 't' and minds every detail.
Two very different villains. Two very different driving forces:
Can we catch the Jackal?
Can we keep Ben Wade?
The endings of both films are very satisfying, and I'd recommend either.
Watched a few oldies and some somewhat recent newbies recently. Having lived in Japan until recently, I don't get a lot access to watch indies or very current movies because they take a lot of time to reach Japan so I usually just wait until they're out on video.
Triangle of Sadness (2022) - Loved the satire of the ultra rich. I guess some people might consider the satire a bit too on-the-nose but I think it added to the hilarity and chaos that happens.
Casino (1995) - Rewatched this after a while. I don't remember what caused me to rewatch it, maybe a clip popped up on social media or something but damn is it such a fun story to go through. Even though it's loooong at 3 hours, you just never get bored cause something tense is always happening. And it goes out with a bang.
Before Sunrise (1995) - Watched it with my partner to get into a romantic mood. It still holds up even if some of the conversations they have feel a little... immature after getting older myself. I haven't seen the other two so I plan to watch those eventually too.
Ikiru (1952) & Living (2022) - Watched Kurosawa's original and the remake back to back. Both great in their own ways but I actually preferred Living. The story is much tighter and felt more impactful. Kurosawa's went on a bit too long and some scenes felt like they dragged on.
Evil Dead Rise (2023) - Great (second?) reboot to the series. The first reboot was okay but I don't remember much memorable about it. This one was pleasantly gory and grotesque and a cool changeup in setting from the originals.
The Favourite (2016) - Upon hearing about Yorgos Lanthimos' upcoming movie that looks wonderfully surreal, I had to make sure to watch his other movies after loving Lobster. This one is less surreal than Lobster and the upcoming one, but it was a great piece of historical fiction. Engaging the whole way through.
I love Casino so much, I know it's an unpopular opinion but I think it beats Goodfella's by a mile. Well, maybe just a kilometer. They are different films, but the purpose of both (at least in my view) is the encapsulation/glorification of a place/time before rug pulling and seeing the consequences of the long-term life of crime. Casino really just made Vegas into a character of it's own almost entirely through its cinematography and blocking. Like I usually don't complement a films blocking, but it made a big impact here. A place that really feels like it takes the luckiest of us, chews them up, and spits them back out to where they came from. Not a place where people go, but a place where people leave.
Plus I think Pesci and De Niro really get the spotlight, and it's also my all-time favorite Sharon Stone performance. Not to mention the perfect casting of James Woods as a pimp (not his first time playing a pimp, dude plays it well).
I could go on for hours (just like Casino does) about the film, but I'll just say I'm glad you enjoyed it!
It's been so long since seeing Goodfellas that I can't even compare them because I completely forgot what it was like. However, I kinda remember not enjoying it as much as everyone else seemed to. I might have been too young to appreciate it at the time. Casino I enjoyed immediately after the first watch, though I can't remember when that was anyway. Maybe it's time for a rewatch of Goodfellas for me but I need a little break from that style of crime drama.
I saw Elemental today actually. I wasn’t planning on it especially after Cannes. But it’s been getting really good word of mouth from general audiences and has actually been legging out really well (it will outgross Lightyear despite opening to less than half of it).
It was kind of… boring. Man, I just haven’t really liked a Pixar movie since Soul (I didn’t care for Turning Red or Luca either). And this felt like, maybe, a decent movie from some other animation studio like Sony or Dreamworks. But it’s just bizarre coming from Pixar. Not that I expect every Pixar movie to be WALL-E, but it doesn’t even match perceived weaker Pixar films like Brave (which I actually like more than most). It’s not a strong story, the characters are one-dimensional, and I find the themes to be uninspired.
I’ve seen a lot of people say “the movie is fine but it looks beautiful.” I don’t think it’s actually that good looking, some shots sure, but I wasn’t blown away by it. I think Brave and Monsters U were better looking for their time.
In my opinion, Pixar’s slump started with Onward. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that that was their first movie not to have any involvement from Lasseter. That’s a general problem with film studios where a guy at the top can be so influential that once he’s gone there’s a noticeable difference in quality. Lasseter may have been a creep but studio heads like him are rare, he was probably the spiritual successor to Walt himself.
Anyways, I hope Elio is better next year
In the year of our Lord Miles Morales, if somebody is gonna say that an animated movie looks good they better mean it. Haha.
Incredibles 2 was the biggest Pixar disappointment ever, and that was a couple of years before Onward. I liked Soul, Luca and Turning Red more. Soul especially I thought was very good, but it gets a lot of hate online.
Soul was really good and I thought Turning Red was their best movie in many years, but it didn't really feel like a Pixar movie (not a bad thing at this point).
Onward was 2020, right? Pixar has lost their mojo for the better part of a decade at this point. I'll admit I didn't love Coco like everybody else seemed to (I enjoyed it though).
I think one of the things that is interesting to me, and that I quite like, is that Pixar is trying things that aren't necessarily for everyone. You've listed three movies here that are amongst our family favourites - Turning Red, Onward, Luca - because they each resonated for someone in the family, for some reason or another. I won't claim that they're all great movies, but I think it's important that they make movies that might not be for everyone.
Turning Red really resonated with my wife and middle daughter. As a child of a family that immigrated to Toronto, there were a lot of things my wife absolutely loved about the movie, and it brought a lot of joy to her. As a kid of about the same age as the main character, there were a lot of things that my daughter also identified with. It was great to see representation and story that was relevant to groups that don't get much representation at all.
Luca was a big one for my son, because we watched it right as he was switching schools and trying to fit in with a set of potential new friends. It's a simple story, but it's one of the first movies that he has identified with and actually talked about how he identified with it.
Onward is one we all loved, but I have to say that things with fathers and sons connecting hits me right in the feels; I liked Onward so much more than Soul, which I thought was cute but didn't have much of a message that I cared about because the exploration of determinism and souls isn't one that speaks to me at all.
I don't think of the last batch of movies as a slump so much as a branching out and understanding that not everything has to be made exclusively for the audiences that they have always made for.
I saw some movies that seemed as if they were made specifically for me.
Cocaine Bear is a movie that delivers exactly what is promised by the title. I love the cast, I love the premise, I love the execution. Everything about it is a B movie, and it knows it's a B movie from the get go, and everyone in it knows they are in a B movie, and they act like they are in a B movie. It's funny, it's silly, the effects are not unacceptable. It is not a movie for the squeamish; the bear kills a lot of people, gruesomely, and the kills are often played for humour. If that's not your jam, then I recommend avoiding it.
Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is exactly what a DnD movie should be. This was a believable campaign at every turn and I found it completely enjoyable. As the frequent face of our DnD party, I loved the scene where Pine's bard is trying to do something useful during a fight and he's mostly just sitting there doing nothing. Overall, I found it great as a person who loves DnD and also think it's pretty good for people who are looking for a more generic comedy fantasy.
Possessor by Brandon Cronenberg is the spiritual successor to existenZ by Brandon's father, David Cronenberg. The Cronen-apple has not fallen far from the Cronen-tree; this was a gruesome psychological body horror. It is grim, disgusting, and hard to watch, but it's very well done and interesting.
Saw Cocaine Bear in theaters a few weeks ago, and my experience was just like yours. That video delivered on basically everything I'd hoped it would. Give me a self-aware "dumb" creature feature any day of the week. There's just something so fun and lighthearted, plus you get cool effects!
"We were going to name him Texas!" :(
I loved it so much, and I actually really enjoyed her previous movies - Charlie's Angels and Pitch Perfect 2 - quite a bit as well. I won't claim that they're going in my top movies of all time, but I enjoyed them all.
Saw DnD last night and thought it was pretty good. I was initially worried because the very opening was a bit lame (the tired "twist" of a strong female fighter taking out a massive ogre) but then Chris Pine starts his flashback story and the film really gets going.
They had set up and pay off of events, rather than deus ex solutions so many films pull. The special effects were imaginative, and some of the POV style shots of action were great. I've played Baldur's Gate and Eye Of The Beholder but never been a big DnD fan, so hearing them talk about the locations from that world was so weird.
I liked that the ambiguous guy who maybe the heroes should not trust literally saves a cat, so hilariously on the nose. And whatsisface from Love Actually, the English guy, was brilliant playing himself haha. Also, do you think lutes will make a comeback? I kinda want one now.
The magic was well done and showed novel variety. It didn't turn into Harry Potter, where everyone just uses "gun spell". A surprisingly good movie, wasn't expecting it to be that good. I hope they make more of 'em.
The Hunt For the Wilderpeople a Taika Waititi film. 2016
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4698684/
People who don't want to see a hunting scene shouldn't see this film, but I think most people would really enjoy it. It's about a foster child, a tween boy who is placed on a farm in New Zealand. Life happens in unexpected ways and he and an old curmudgeon with a lot of wilderness survival skills go on a trek through the New Zealand bush. Child welfare services enlists the government to help find and reclaim the boy and it becomes a man hunt. The cinematography is excellent. It has found family themes. It has one of the more entertaining vehicle chase scenes I have seen and I grew up in the 70's.
Saw Nimona yesterday. Really loved it for the premise and raw topics being exposed. Also LGBT representation!
Last week for Movie Night, it was my wife's choice; she chose Mystery Men, a movie I could have sworn that I'd seen when I was a teenager during it's initial release. After watching for a little bit, I definitely had not seen it and is not at all a fun watch. We did end-up watching about an hour of it before my wife got too frustrated with it and shut it off; which is fine, I was...entertained I guess, but not really invested.
This week will be her choice again, since the last one was a dud, so I believe she'll be choosing Viva Las Vegas.
One of the local colleges here puts on a really excellent film series, so I got to see the new 4k restoration of Bela Tarr's The Werckmeister Harmonies in a theater!
This was my first Tarr, and holy shit am I going to have to explore the rest of his filmography now. If you're looking for someone to compare him to that's a little more popular in the world cinema genre, think Tarkovsky post-Solaris. There's about 39 shots total in the whole 2h20m runtime which allowed for a really amazing sense of immersion into the setting of the film, which takes place in a Hungarian, or maybe German, village on the outskirts of time and space (that's how the filmmaker describes it, anyways). A travelling circus comes to town with what they claim to be the worlds largest whale, and a Prince in tow who has gained a sort of following as hundreds of outsiders pour into the town and gather around the truck that the attractions arrived in.
Minor spoilers for about the first 10-15 minutes of the film to discuss themes and symbols, so if you want to go in entirely blind I've only really given the back-of-the-DVD description so far
The theme of the film is the nature of art and the nature of change, or more specifically the intersection of those two things. Werckmeister himself (as I understand it, I know jack shit about music) is the guy that created octaves and scales as we read them on music sheets today and an exploration of his theory and what's wrong with it is the theory that really starts the film and what you should view all of the symbols and events that proceed it through the lens of.
End minor spoilers
Because there's only 39 shots, we get some really beautiful one-take scenes that horrify, and yet are so artful. The protagonist acts as a perfect conduit for the viewer to observe the events of the film from, and following his journey is to experience the film for yourself. However the long shots can also be to the detriment of the film, as many scenes are comprised of minutes-long shots of characters walking to their destinations, sometimes without even much camera movement and that can get a little silly even for someone as pretentious about film as me.
It's not for everyone, it's black & white, released in 2000, it was shot in German and dubbed in Hungarian (not dubbed well, I might add) for some reason, and I mean even with a budget as low as $1.6M the film only made about $65k at the box office so it is niche, but if you're a fan of art-house and world cinema then definitely find a way to watch it. I'm already blocking out a way to watch Tarr's Sátántangó, 7 and a half hour runtime be damned!
The Worst Person in the World (2022) (Verdens verste menneske) is excellent. I don't watch a lot of new films, but this one really stood out.
Old Henry (2021) was also great. Its nice to see relatively straightforward western. I hope we get more of these. Tim Blake Nelson is excellent in everything, too. He's got such a je ne sais quoi -- but he completely fits every role he takes on.
Saw Past Lives (2023) and it really struck a chord with me. Very slow but every scene felt so "real." There were no bad guys, just "what-ifs." A romance without the cliches. Felt really connected to Arthur as we have very similar circumstances... it really makes me want to double-down on learning Korean to know my wife better
Are you like John Magaro in the film?
With the exception that my wife came to America in her 20s, not as a child, and to my knowledge there is no long-lost-lover, yes
I rewatched Chronicle, the found footage movie, on the plane to Japan for my vacation, and it's so weird looking back on it nowadays in a more "post-internet" lens. Maybe I was just more unaware of the internet back when I first watched it (I was a tween to be fair) but it really hit some notes of how someone can fall into inceldom. Maybe I'm reading too much into it though, overall still a really good movie.