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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.
Watched Asteroid City. Loved it. I know Wes Anderson films are becoming a kind of cliche but I really like his style. Everything has so much intentionality to it, and I like the use of practical effects as much as possible.
It occured to me that the way Wes Anderson characters speak directly into the camera is a way for us to fully make eye contact and to engage with a character as a person we might meet face to face, instead of something we watch the action of.
This movie, a story about a story, reminds me of Adaptation (2002).
Anyway I liked it a lot.
Asteroid City wasn't entirely to my tastes, but quite a fun watch none the less. The entire cast was spendid and I hope that Tom Hanks joins the regular troupe. Probably the last movie of Anderson's that I really loved was The Grand Budapest Hotel.
I totally agree about Wes Anderson's style. It's become so honed. The end result may not always land for me, but I still find his films a treat to watch. His visual style is distinctly his own. It's refreshing to see a director distill their essence so particularly as they evolve. I'll be there opening week for anything he releases.
I just watched Sorry To Bother You this morning and really loved it all the up until the last maybe 10-15 minutes which sort of felt like they weren't sure how to wrap things up. I still think it's a very good movie even so.
I watched Inherit the Wind for the first time. As someone who grew up with MASH, seeing Colonel Sherman Potter as the judge was an interesting tidbit. Another major character was someone I knew as Darren the husband on Bewitched.
The script was very intelligently written. The issues in the film are sadly timely today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inherit_the_Wind_(1960_film)
I've been on a real hater train lately. I've seen Oppenheimer, John Wick 4, GotG 3, Asteroid City and all of them were just okay. It's strange to feel like an involuntary contrarian and those movies did so many things right but just didn't click with me.
Then I saw Past Lives. What a wonderful, warm, and emotionally both true and healthy movie.
I've just seen Past Lives. Enjoyed it a lot and absolutely bawled my eyes out at the end too. It was very relatable with all the dilemmas, uneasiness and tensions of indecisiveness, lost connections and happenstances of everyday lives.
Any similar film to recommend?
Blue Valentine
I saw Talk to Me for National Cinema Day. I don't usually fall for the hype from A24 horror films, but this always looked more like a Blumhouse film.
It was really good. It was Australian, first of all, which threw me off. But it's an allegory for drug addiction. It wears it's themes of its sleeves, and would be a good movie to show like an English class in high school. Only problem with that would be just how gruesome it was. I was not expecting how brutal it was going to be. There's one scene, which I won't spoil, but once it starts I was just in shock at how bad the gore was. It was so visceral and I have no idea how they filmed one part of it.
Yeah I liked the ending. It showed the cyclical nature of addiction, and how people who succumb to their drug addiction end up becoming one of many cautionary tales.
I rewatched Thelma & Louise this week in theater with a big crowd. The sheer thirst that would explode every time Brad Pitt showed up on screen was unexpected, but hilariously fun.
I also had a VHS movie night with a friend and we watched Kafka from 1991 and Out of the Body from 1989. Kafka was a definitely surprise. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, starring Jeremy Irons, and written by Lem Dobbs. It's darkly comedic and fits right in with the likes of Brazil and The Trial. It never even got a DVD release in the US sadly. Seems that Soderbergh now owns the rights and has been working on remastering it and releasing it as part of a seven film box set. That was announced in 2021 and as far as I can tell hasn't had any public updates since. It sounds like an awesome set of 4K remasters so hopefully it does end up happening.
I finally got around to watching the Shudder documentary Sharksploitation. It’s not going to blow your mind or anything, but it’s a fun documentary about the history of shark films. There’s some good information about the infamous Jaws 3, People 0.
I did learn about an Indian musical remake of Jaws from 1996 named Aatank that I’m going to have to track down.
I appreciated that they brought in a bunch of marine biologists to talk about the effect that shark movies have had on people’s perceptions of sharks.
I rewatched Jaws and Jaws 2 over the weekend.
Jaws is such a great film. I'd forgotten just how long the 2nd half of it goes on for, once the 3 men are on the boat searching for the shark. It's nearly half the movie. The tension, the interplay of the old-school approach put up against the modern tech, the way the "young guy" gradually wins Quint over. And it really leans into the Moby Dick homage with all the "I hope you break your back", the barrels, smashing the radio. I'm now the same age as Quint, and he was supposed to be this ancient sea-dog haha. Anyway, totally worth watching again and holds up very well.
Jaws 2 by comparison. Oh boy. People say the effects are bad, but that's kinda par for the course, and I thought the shark scenes were alright in a cheesy way. It's everything else that sucks xD As a period piece it is still entertaining I suppose. The "male gaze" camerawork on the beach was so cringe! a 10 second shot of 3 asses in bikinis. Ok then. The child actors do their best, but they are asked too much and can't carry the whole movie. The girls' constant screaming is insufferable, I had to mute the audio several times. And the lines... "look, there it is", "for christ's sake"... it's really bad.