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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.
May December
Comparing this to my post last week about Saltburn, this is camp done right.
Obviously Todd Haynes is a better, at the very least a more subtle, director than Fennell. And he’s also a better writer. Every scene he writes is engrossing, even if it seems mundane on the surface. The performances he gets in his films are also top tier. He makes melodramas with a more artistic tilt to them. And that’s right up my alley.
It’s weird to me that Netflix decided to submit this in the comedy category at the Globes. It’s very clearly a drama even if it’s supposed to be satirizing Lifetime movies. It is perhaps not as lush looking as Carol was, but considering this takes place in 2015 (hey that’s the year Carol released) I think that’s fine.
It’s definitely one of my favorite movies of the year. I think Natalie Portman gives one of the best performances of the year here. Charles Melton, who’s apparently a Riverdale graduate, does such an incredible job especially for someone that was in Riverdale and he’s perhaps the best actor to come out of that show.
As much as I stated how Saltburn was not made with me in mind as an audience, even if this is courting a similar audience, it is just too good for me not to like it. Speaks to how good of a filmmaker Haynes is.
I watched Paris, Texas from 1984 last night, which was interesting in that it is actually an European production, but it has a very "americana" look and feel to it. Though I am sure it would have been a different film if it was an American production.
It starts of with an interesting hook with a mystery about a man walking alone in the middle of desert and he has apparently been gone for four years. But as the story evolves that mystery becomes less important as the drama of the family slowly unfolds. What I especially like about this is how the drama is presented in such a low key and almost mellow fashion. It is heavy topics, but everyone is generally being nice people wanting to help each other and to the right thing. Little conflict to speak of and no need for people acting overly dramatic. What left me a little puzzled is how Walt and Anne just left the movie in the last act. Their relationship with their adopted son and the issue of the returning father started out really interesting, but was left completely unresolved.