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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.
Been meaning to see Palm Springs since it came out and finally did a couple days ago. Nothing amazing but it is a real solid, enjoyable comedy and those are always, well, enjoyable.
Includes ending spoilers
I think the three leads really make the movie, both in terms of acting and writing. Good characters and good character development. I really like how they handled getting out the loop, with the Cristin Milioti's character using the loop to master quantum physics. And that she had that dedication to do it, but also could understand the fucked up things Andy Sandberg's/JK Simmons characters did to help get them out too.
But so many great one liners that could fall flat but the actors do a great job selling them; eg "This dentist glues teeth!"; "I should never have left The Great Lakes! This place is a nightmare!"; "Little Joey's watering dog shit".
...but I also have a confession to make. I didn't know there was a Palm Springs, CA. I only knew of Palm Springs, FL (and, while I know Irvine, CA - I also grew up near an Irvine, FL). So for a good portion of the movie I'm just like "have these people ever SEEN Florida? It looks nothing like this!". I don't remember at what point it was, but it was mostly a slow realization of ohhhhhh I think this is in Cali and had to pause to google on my phone to see lol
It's a shame you didn't like it more. I loved it, it's top 5 for me that year. It came out the summer of 2020, and it hit me really hard. Cause we were all basically stuck inside a loop, I was especially cause I was endlessly scrolling twitter back then and not being very productive on anything else I could have been doing with my life. I was just existing, much like the characters of the film.
I still really like it, I rewatched it not too long ago. I think that and Borat are like the pandemic movies. They really encapsulate that time period.
There was no Year In Review posted this year! Either that or I missed it.
Here's the post I made last year and the one before that.
I'm gonna do the same thing I did in 2022 and list ten movies I watched the first time that I really enjoyed in 2023 (excluding 2023 releases). I watched 230 movies, I don't think I'm ever gonna watch as many movies as I did in 2021 again.
I also watched the Before Trilogy last year. Really an eye opener for me in how to approach romantic movies, which I have previously most disregarded, because I very rarely believed the attraction between the characters on screen. Hawke and Delpy showed that it is possible to depict true attraction on screen.
I watched 227 movies in 2023. I couldn't possibly narrow it down to a top 10, but I have a general list of best first time watches.
That’s wild to me cause I love romantic comedies and dramas. Brief Encounter is also a romantic drama from David Lean, which I believe was actually a big inspiration for the Before trilogy (that’s not a fact or anything just what I got from watching it).
Probably just previously only been exposed to the bad tropey Hollywood way of falling in love, but this year directors like Linklater, Kieslowski and Wong Kar-wai proved that is possible to direct actors in a different way to get the chemistry through the screen. Brief Encounter has been on my watchlist for a while, might need to bump it up a bit.
I had tried to make a top 10 list of my own but impossible to decide. Tried top 10 by genre, top 10 each month, etc. and it’s way too hard.
Letterboxd has me at 366 movies/604 hours/70 rewatches for 2023. Past years are around 285 titles or so. I watch too many movies and way too many good movies to boil it down, really. It may be easier to list the top 10 movies I didn’t like 😆
This is not like a rigid list or anything. Well the top 5 probably are, but i went through my Letterboxd diary and picked movies I really liked or really stuck with me throughout the year.
I don’t actually log rewatches. Mostly because I get into phases where I watch one movie over and over. And I don’t want people to know I rewatched Tron Legacy five times in a row or, what I did last year, rewatch the guardians movies just in a loop for like a week.
So as the Globes are this weekend, and as Barbie is likely to win big there. I'm gonna go ahead and link to this comment I made almost a year ago after EEAAO swept the Oscar's. I became very bullish on Barbie's Oscar chances after I basically flopped that year since I was very resistant to EEAAO being an Oscar contender until September. (Also considering how opinion has somewhat changed on the movie I maintain that my opinions on the film are gonna become more widespread thanks to backlash from it sweeping).
But I'm gonna give myself a pat on the back for being somewhat clairvoyant with this. I did not think it would be a billion dollar smash, but I did think it'd be a big enough hit to warrant attention from awards bodies. This is also another situation where I'm not fully on board the praise train. But I've made my peace with it unlike last year.
I had to give up on a movie yesterday after about 20 minutes. That rarely happens. It was Lars von Triers Melancholia. I quite frankly got sea sickness from the handheld camera work. Handheld and dynamic camerawork can work really well and it is really just a style choice. Not something that have bothered me much before, even in the various Dogme films by Vinterberg and Trier. Perhaps because unlike in the Dogme films, this is a clear high resolution picture and not the home video quality of their 90s films.
I honestly don't know why it is filmed in such a way. You have regular scenes of people sitting down and the camera just sways dizzyingly all over the place and characters constantly falling out of the frame.
That was one of my favorites when I was in high school. I think I rewatched it during the pandemic just because it felt right. But I quite enjoyed the cinematography of it. I thought it looked pretty.
I did the exact same thing. What a boring slog of a movie - at least the start!
I was scrolling through options on a flight and chose the BlackBerry film.
The first 75 percent of the movie was interesting and fun to watch. After executives refused to admit that the iPhones would threaten their business model, I turned it off. I didn't want to watch the consequences of hybris.
Personally I was a long time BlackBerry fan and user. I've never owned an iPhone. Apps are convenient, but the keyboard was something I loved.
I would be curious to hear responses to this film from tech people.