Midweek Movie Free Talk

Michael Haneke is a director whose film I look really forward to while also being a bit scared on what kind of misery he now puts me through. If you don't like films that make you feel uncomfortable, avoid his work. But it is rewarding in its own way and I really respect a filmmaker who so consistently can evoke strong emotions like no other.

I watched Benny's Video which in a way feels like a precursor to his more well known Funny Games, even with some of the same actors. Most of us have probably seen movies about coldblooded emotionless killers, but I guess when it involves 14 year old kids and their parents helping them it is a bit different. Like with Funny Games it has a long buildup with lots of mundane boring things but with an underlying tone of "something feels wrong", leading to a horrible kill scene. Benny's Video has a longer aftermath with more mundane family scenes, where the characters on screen showing basically no emotion and handle things in a very cold calculated manner, which allows the viewer to sit completely alone with the horrible feelings about what happened - and I find that really powerful in a very different way than other movies that let the character play out their misery. But that appears to be Haneke's trademark.

Maestro

I love A Star is Born. It’s my favorite movie of 2018. I believe that Cooper should have won Lead Actor and Gaga should have won Lead Actress. So I was very much looking forward to this even through the initial test screening reports being so negative. I was fully ready to be one of the few people to love this, like both Amsterdam and Bardo last year.

I realize what I wrote makes it sound like I’m about to say I didn’t like this. I loved this. I knew I was gonna love it and my expectations were met. It is a gorgeous looking film. It is very much as if Cooper made a film in the 40s. The cinematography, the performances, the writing, it’s all in the style of a film from that era. It’s like if Mank was good.

A Star is Born was like a liberal Clint Eastwood film and this is the opposite of that. In other words A Star is Born had a very raw and grounded feel to it. The handheld cinematography and the naturalistic performances gave it this raw indie energy. This is very much theatrical. Every shot is heavily framed. There is so much attention to detail in every shot.

Cooper really is a surprising voice in cinema. Who could have seen this coming when he was in The Hangover (which by the way fucking GOATED film).

Also with this and and Asteroid City; Maya Hawke is proving to be a very talented nepo baby.

I have been watching Shane from 1953 and Pale Rider from 1985. Two very similar westerns made more than 30 years apart, making for an interesting comparison.

Shane is the very classic 50s western about peaceful homesteaders against ruthless cattle ranchers. Good guys and bad guys. With the help from a mysterious outsider, they overcome the rancher that tries to drive them out of their land and are now free to live the American dream.

Pale Rider is basically the same story, though here it is miners trying to support their families with independent gold mining against the big mining corporation. Eastwood plays the mysterious stranger, being his usual western persona, and the community is saved from the evil profit hungry corporation.

Not much has changed in terms of morals or message, but Eastwood's version is somewhat more violent and while it is obvious we are supposed to side with independent miners, I didn't find it as convincing as in Shane. In Shane both sides were very reluctant to use violence, but both sides are somewhat more trigger happy and out for retaliation in Pale Rider.

Shane is pretty dated and pretty slow moving, whereas Pale Rider is more fast paced and quite a bit funny too, but with the exception of the more scruffy persona Eastwood has for his own character, it doesn't have the moral ambiguity from the spaghetti western that had a huge influence on the genre in that 30 year timespan. But the 80s was a very dead decade for westerns, so this one is worth checking out none the less.

Poor Things

I really liked The Favourite, also a top 5 for me from 2018. I've been looking forward to this for a while, since it was originally supposed to come out last year but got delayed due to the post production throttle that was happening at the time.

It's such a good looking movie. It's very funny. But I don't know if I liked it as much as The Favourite. The thing with The Favourite though is that it grew on me, just by thinking about it and then re-watching it I liked it more. So I assume that's exactly what's going to happen with this film.

It's basically a deconstruction of maturing as a human. Emma Stone is a woman who has had a baby's brain implanted in her. And she goes through stages of life in an accelerated way. We start the movie off with her as a toddler and end it with her being a woman in her 30s. We see her reach puberty and start becoming obsessed with sex, and then as a teenager she starts boinking Mark Ruffalo, and then she enters her 20s as a sexually liberated woman (the past equivalent of an OnlyFans chick complete with being a socialist).

It's really brilliant in that regard. The way that it looks at life, and how it sort of sheds a light on how hilarious a lot of this stuff really is when it's blatantly said out loud.

A highlight for me was Mark Ruffalo's performance (people say I look like him pretty often but that's not important here). He is hilarious here, his comedic timing and line deliveries are gold. He's done many comedies before, but here he's playing against type. He's usually a nice guy (probably thanks to his roles in romcoms specifically 13 Going on 30) but here he is a really terrible person.

It was a good time. It's a very explicit movie, it's the most explicit awards contender since The Wolf of Wall Street. So if you're gonna watch this just be prepared for a lot (and I mean A LOT) of sex scenes.