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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.
I don't know why I'm currently obsessed with 2021 but I've been rewatching some movies from that year. I'm still going through some of them, and plan on watching movies I never watched from that year that I never did like Benedetta and Petit Maman.
The most jarring re-watch I did, and perhaps the most jarring re-watch of my life, was In The Heights. I remember being excited for the film ever since the trailer dropped in late 2019 (back when it was scheduled for 2020). I was/still am a big fan of Lin Manuel Miranda. Even through my extremely online leftist phase I was a fan of his. I didn't care that he was cringey or whatever, I liked the music that he produced.
In The Heights was the first movie I watched in theaters post-pandemic. Which, looking back now, is probably the reason why I had such an incredibly positive reaction towards it. I loved it, it was immediately my favorite film of that year. It was on HBOMAX at the same time so I watched it like two more times right after. Even at the end of the year I had it as my favorite and West Side Story as my second favorite. After a while though, and after rewatching West Side Story a few times, I decided that actually WSS was my favorite. And after watching Licorice Pizza that ended up as my second favorite of the year.
I knew that if I rewatched In The Heights I was gonna like it less. Which is why I avoided doing that for the longest time. But recently I bit the bullet on it. And I was shocked at how much I ended up actually disliking it. I wouldn't say it's bad but it is very rough. Especially compared to how pristine West Side Story is. I think a lot of the musical numbers are poorly shot and I think a lot of the editing is choppy and uneven. And the performances are mostly not good. Especially from Melissa Barrera who is not a good actress, as she has shown in Scream getting acted in circles by Jenna Ortega.
The "celebration of culture" stuff feels very 2010s. Very I'm With Her. I had already sort of gotten over a lot of that stuff by the time I watched it, but I guess I watched it right before I was fully done with it.
I haven't fully done a rewatch of tick, tick... BOOM! but I have re-watched some of it. That is a lot better. The performances are better, the editing is much better, it's just better made overall. And the reason I bring that up here is because Lin Manuel Miranda directed it.
Other rewatches I've done have not been as jarring. I rewatched Last Night in Soho, which I loved when it came out, and came out of it still liking it but not loving it anymore. Similar thing happened with Nightmare Alley. In more positive directions: rewatches of The Green Knight, and No Time To Die were positive I still like them the same I did when I first watched them. I grew new appreciation for C'mon C'mon, The Last Duel, The Card Counter, and Dune.
American Fiction
I thought this was really funny. It's a little rough, and a little messy, it definitely feels like a directorial debut. But I really liked a lot of the stuff that it was making fun of. The lead character is very relatable to me, he shares a lot of my opinions.
I'm not black, I am Mexican and I look it, believe me on that. And I've always been annoyed at a lot of the Latino literature that gets published is a lot of stuff that goes like "I went to the panaderia with my abuela and ate pan dulce." And it's always by people who don't actually know Spanish, which makes it even funnier. It's stuff very much written for white liberals, not me.
It's basically a breakdown of that pandering we see a lot. And I appreciated that aspect of it, and I think it does it well. I just wish the rest of the movie was as good rather than just okay.
fellow mexican here, can confirm! also...guilty of not being able to speak fluent spanish, but eh, my parents didn't teach me waddya gonna do.
anyway, i feel you so much about this! this lasting (perhaps even growing?) trend of shoe-horning culture into every possible place in fiction work written by latinos to remind the reader that you're latino is so boring. like, i feel like the intention is to be Empowering and Proud of our Heritage, and that's great, but...what are we saying beyond that? yeah, being a minority can suck sometimes and cultural bleed is strange and makes identity messy, we've been talking about this for 50 years. i think i've come to a place of acceptance on it and wanna read/write stories about more specific/nuanced topics about what? i dunno, pick something.
hopefully i don't sound like a nut, but, being a mexican american in los angeles who pays attention to local literature i just need something new. also hopefully not a bad example but here, i think melissa lozada oliva (at least in her poetry) achieves telling beautiful stories while letting you know where she comes from as a minority and not shoving your face in it clumsily: https://eng220oerclone.commons.gc.cuny.edu/melissa-lozada-oliva-yolanda-and-selena-dont-talk-anymore/
i love how in that poem it's like 'if you know you know', but if you don't it's still a terribly beautiful poem. /rant
btw, the 'I went to the pana....' line made me lmao, it seriously is like that.
Yeah that's the way it is with a lot of subsequent generations. My parents are from Mexico so I was required to have it as my first language. I think that upbringing makes me feel distant from a lot of Chicano culture schtick, even though I grew up in a rough neighborhood with a bunch of Chicanos. I don't even really love Rudolfo Anaya's books and I'm also from Albuquerque.
Part of the issue with me feeling distant, is that my mom's side of the family are all not the typical demo that came to the States. Most of my mom's brothers and sisters have college degrees from Mexico. They're doctors and lawyers and engineers (all of which they had to give up when they came over here). And they speak Spanish a different way than a lot of Mexicans that cross the border. So even though I speak Spanish pretty well, and was surrounded by unfiltered Mexican culture, I get seen as being white washed. Not just because I sound white when I speak English, but because of the way that I act and the way that I dress (which is really more or less how my mom taught me to dress). That was a long rant of me not really saying anything, but the main character of the film is in that position. He doesn't talk "black" he doesn't dress "black" his parents were educated, his brother and sister are doctors.
we're getting into some interesting territory imo! my parents aren't formally educated, and we also live in a rough neighborhood. i never understood why we differed so much from everything our family was surrounded by.
i feel your experience being ostracized by not conforming to the norm. i saw that American Fiction is an adaptation by a novel from the...90s? by a really interesting sounding experimental writer. if you haven't already you should look him up! his name is Percival Everett
I've kicked off the new year with a Jackie Chanuary watch list. So far I've watched Police Story 1-4 and Wheels on Meals. He was such a powerhouse of action comedy and it's great revisiting some movies I've seen before and some that are new to me. Wheels on Meals was hilarious and the final fight between Jackie Chan and Benny The Jet was so cool. They're incredibly fast and the choreography is what so many action scenes strive to have even these days.
Doing good on my promise I finally watched three films from 2021 that everyone had watched and loved, but I never got around to:
Benedetta
This was actually my least favorite of the bunch. I wasn't engrossed in what was happening, but I liked the ultra violence in it. It's something I liked but not one of my favorites like I saw a lot of critics have on their list.
Memoria
So this was like, a huge critic movie. It also had a thing where supposedly it would only ever play in theaters and you could never watch it at home. It wasn't long after that a digital copy became available which is how I was able to watch it.
It's good, I was actually engrossed by it more than I thought I would be. I'm still not a fan of these super slow films that test your patience. But I felt more engrossed by this than I did Drive My Car. It does slow down at a certain point, which was hard to believe, before this twist happens (I already knew about it before hand) and that's kind of when I lost interest. It's good, but I always feel like people are fucking with me when they say the enjoyed themselves watching it.
Petit Maman
This was actually my favorite of the bunch. It's 82 minutes long. That's not why it's my favorite but it definitely helps. It's a nice sweet story. There's a lot of texture to it, it's very endearing and sweet.
It's minimalist but there's still a clear distinct style and voice to it. It's wild to me that France did not choose either this or Happening for their entry this year and instead went with Titane.
I watched See How They Run (2022). It's described as a "comedy mystery", but it's neither funny nor very mysterious. It was pretty meh. The trailer made it seem like the comedy was faster-paced, but it was quite a drag. During the actual movie the comedy timing was totally off and fell flat.
The whodunit aspect was disappointing. The police officers didn't really advance their investigation. They bumbled through the film, and in the end the killer reveal wasn't even performed by the investigators. Part way through there was an apparent interesting twist, but it went nowhere. I thought Saoirse Ronan was good as the enthusiastic newbie constable. But Sam Rockwell's character was perpetually bored and dismissive, which dragged the whole thing down. Also, I can't stand Adrien Brody's smug face, so that didn't help.
Curiously, I watched the season 3 Columbo episode "Swan Song" the same day. It's the one starring Johnny Cash. He sings "I Saw the Light", which by a strange coincidence is also played at the end of See How They Run. It has no relation at all to the story of the film, so I dunno why it's there. The Columbo episode has aged pretty badly, but I enjoyed it more than See How They Run in every way.
Sigh. I seem to always end up watching movies I don't like, which is one of the reasons I've seen far fewer recently.
I have been waiting to see Zone of Interest but apparently it’s not gonna be playing near me for some time. I thought it’d hit theaters by now but oh well. I had already posted this but I deleted it cause I was like “I can wait a week or two to watch zone.” Anyways, here’s my top 10 of 2023 (as always it’s subject to change):
Edit: Oh yeah I almost forgot to say. This is the first time since 2020 that I do not have any rotten films in my top 10. In 2022 I had the trifecta of Amsterdam, Babylon, and Bardo. And in 2021 I had Don't Look Up.
I saw Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans and I have a complex relationship with all these "movies about movies" that have been released in the last some years. Especially Babylon. The good thing about The Fabelmans is that while it is basically the origin story of Steven Spielberg himself, it is still mostly tied to a very personal family story and I think it is a good decision that Spielberg never explicit says it is a biopic about himself, because it allows the movie just be a good story, a good movie, with a slightly fairytale feel to it - that can be enjoyed by people who might not know who Spielberg is or his story of how he got into making movies.
The weird thing is, I usually don't like the type of films Spielberg typically makes. His movies is leaning heavily on the sentimental side of things, things are told very straight with characters often straight up saying the moral message or what we are supposed to think, rather than hinting at it with a bit more subtle acting. But that is just how Spielberg tells stories and it works better for him, where I often find that type of directing falls flat with other directors.
In many ways Spielberg plays it safe here. There aren't many surprises or huge risks. What it does give is a cozy almost magical realism personal story of how a young man takes the engineering side from his father and the more spiritual personal side from his mother, and combine it into movies that are both technical marvels and has a lot of heart to them. Basically the trademark of most Spielberg movies. He has a knack for creating great spectacle with huge technical achievements, and while the drama can be a bit melodramatic - it just works.
I think that's because Spielberg is coming at it from a sincere place. Following in the footsteps of his biggest inspirations John Ford and Frank Capra.
I love melodrama. I think melodrama is a great genre for storytelling, stories and performances don't have to be subtle in order to be great.
I love Fablemans it was one of my favorites of 2022. And Spielberg should have probably won Director, which is a thought that's become more commonplace in online film circles.
I love Williams's score for it, even though it's not as present as his scores usually are, it really captures the tone of a sad fairytale.
I also think Tony Kushner is an underappreciated screenwriter, probably because he mostly only works with Spielberg, but he's great. He's a formalist and his classic storytelling structure lends itself to Spielberg's style.