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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'll use this to try and make up my mind about a couple of movies I saw recently!
Finally saw Poor Things. Way, way more sexual than I thought, lol, and I guess this is why some people will be put off. I guess I'll look at it the European way: She likes sex, so what? That at least seems honest to how big of a role sex plays in people's lives. The rest is way more interesting, though. Loved the settings and weird mood, it's been a while since a movie this big and expertly done dared to do anything close to this. Emma Stone and the rest of the cast is excellent, too, of course. There's something endearing about Bella's unshakeable optimism, quite in contrast to the bleak, nihilist tone of Yorgos Lanthimos' usual work. I'm starting to like each Lanthimos movie I see more than the last. His early work is too cynical for me. This one is still dark and brutal, but it also offers a more positive view. One of these movies that reminds me why I love watching movies.
Napoleon. I guess it's a history lesson. I did not know how Russia defeated Napoleon, it was a bit of a shock. If you know your history, you'll instead get a nice illustration. I guess the battle scenes are grand but also slightly green-screen-y. There were jumps in time that are understandable but made me question why some parts were done in such great detail and other major developments not shown at all. I found myself confused and a bit bored.
Killers of the Flower Moon. Dare I say it? Leonardo DiCaprio is a shit actor. I get that he tries. But his face is doing these weird things. I guess he looked at photographs of Ernest Burkhart and decided to give himself this permanent frowning face with the corners of the mouth really low but it looks comical. Like, he looks like this for half the movie. I couldn't take it seriously. And for the rest he just kinda sits there, waiting for something to do. I guess it's Scorsese's fault for making a 3.5 hour movie. Nothing happens for half of it. This should have been edited down to 2 hours or less. This getting an Oscar nomination for editing is laughable. Interesting story but the movie is a drag and I'm so done with DiCaprio.
Past Lives. Not much happens but at least this is well directed and acted. I guess it's about how real-world relationships tend to be complicated and how people tend to choose a stable life over Hollywood rom-com outbursts. Not sure why you need a movie to show that the real world is not a movie. Stories tend to be about things that aren't the norm, no?
Saltburn. I liked parts of it a lot but it did not need "the twist". It felt cheap. Like something we've seen before and like something to distract from flaws in the rest of the story. It was an unneeded distraction. There's way more interesting things that could have done with these bizarre settings and characters. Loved the soundtrack, though, mostly for nostalgia. The movie is set in 2006 (I think?), just before social media and smartphones, which is a smart choice. So all the parties have 00s indie/dance music. Had Murder on the Dancefloor flap around in my mind for days!
I really liked Past Lives. I thought it was brilliant in terms of direction and cinematography and acting. I took the story more about how the characters look for meaning and a grand scheme in a life where decisions, even choosing the right one given the information and objectively-directed impulses we have at that time, end up causing pain and regret and are at times senseless despite the achieved goal being the ideal.
Watching Saltburn for me was a waste of my life. It seemed too contrived and a lot of the scenes were gratuitous and made no sense no matter how I thought the main character was sociopathic. The ending song is a banger though and I’m all for people using it on social media as they are now.
Haven’t seen the others! I always thought Leo DiCaprio was a good actor though, but I imagine he might be more inclined to experiment now that he’s won an Oscar (and is safe).
I thought the time jumps were weird as well, and the criticisms of Phoenix's age are definitely deserved because it really did not make sense to have an actor play a character that is half is age in some parts.
I recently watched Bondarchuk's Waterloo (1970) and War and Peace (~1965) (my thoughts on them here and I have to say that Napoleon (2023) has nothing on those movies. Those battle scenes are next level, like the most real I have seen in any movie in my life, and I have watched a lot of movies. Fully practical effects and thousands of extras is just not gonna be beat by Napoleon, because with those scenes fresh in mind, the CGI and splicing of extras and whatever other techniques used was very disappointing, it just falls flat in comparison.
This was probably DiCaprio's worst performance in at least a decade. I did still like the movie but Lily Gladstone stole the show for me. I recognize the movie as being well done etc., but was ultimately also kind of bored and could not agree more that it really suffers from its runtime. Three and a half hours, and this is what they do with it? Pretty strange decisions were made in the making of it, that's for sure.
I agree with you about the twist but I can kind of forgive it in a way because I found the rest of the movie to be just so fucking good. The ending was definitely contrived, so it takes the movie as a whole down a notch, but still a great watch I thought.
DiCaprio gave a great performance and should have been nominated over three of the Lead Actor nominees actually.
Watched Joy Ride. At times similar movies like Hangover and Bridesmaids allowed me to suspend my judgment with the absurd comedy scenes and feel kind of involved, but with Joy Ride I thought the senselessness of some dialogue and how they reacted to them completely detached from their characters really made it feel like fiction. I felt that as the movie went on, while Audrey (the lawyer) began as the sort of balanced logical thinker and Lolo was the comic, eventually none of them operated on any reasonable guidance and it felt like everyone was just “the comic”. Still it is an achievement as a movie for sure, while also having an all Asian-American (edit: main) cast (I heard it was the first one since Joy Luck club?).
I hated Joy Ride. I thought it was poorly made. Bad writing, bad editing, bad acting, and wildly unfunny.
I think your last sentence is why the film got such high marks from critics, cause if this had an all white cast it would absolutely get torn to shreds.
I felt bad for Stephanie Hsu the whole time.
Instead of watching Poor Things, I decided nah and watched Wanka instead.
To steal @nothis 's comment:
It's like Paddington Bear working with the cook in prison, but for a whole movie.
I've kind of overdosed on cynicism and ugliness and meanness and violence. Wonka was a much needed breath of fresh air that made me cry from the Niceness of it all. I see that critics have dismissed it as flat and twee and one dimensional because it has no "edge". I'm done with edge. Gimme more wholesomeness because I get enough edge from all the edgey click bait all day every day.
From an old school literature criticism point of view, the characters do change and are not one dimensional:
The cartels are standard bad guys and that's fine. But even for them I would argue they changed, for the worse. It started with standard book cooking and calling the cops to enforce the existing (unjust) law, then slightly outside the law with bribe and a bonk on the head, moving on to mass poisoning and eventually outright murder.
Willy Wonka himself changed too. The opposite of good and naive isn't evil and cynicism, it's knowledge that not everyone is good and the stoic determination to remain being good yourself. Evil and cynical is just laying flat and taking the easy way out, going along with the scam and being the biggest scam is easier than holding onto the worthwhile parts of yourself. He was able to defeat the trio with chocolate because he is paying his debt AND he is aware that the greedy are greedy. It wasn't his plan for them to fly up into the air and owe Oompas 1000 fold, he'd accepted that he'd still be dead but he would be dead with his debt paid off, but there's a possibility evil will hurt itself and he allowed room for it to take its course.
The scrub scrub squad began by being resigned to exploitation. They didn't ask the newcomer for news about the outside world or his experiences and how they might escape: they taught him the ropes. Their rebellion and earned freedom was a delight to witness.
As for the pang of sadness I felt at the end of the movie, about how it's all well and good they had a happy ending because Willy Wonka is a magician, but we're stuck here in jail in the real world, scammed into slavery with an insurmountable debt and a depressingly monotonous grind, working for greedy scumbags,
I was comforted by this Christian thought
None of the Scrub squad or little orphan Noodle had any magic, but that's fine. They didn't need to each "be a star" (Disney's Wish) and suddenly awaken to magic collectively strong enough to defeat evil. They have one friend who is magic. Their willingness to join the magical friend, the synergy of participating in his magical energy, even if they cannot participate in the magical essence, is what saved them. And each of them using their unique talent added to the journey out of the cave and back into their rightful place in an improved society.What a delight. I will be adding this to the Paddington Bear 1+2, Green Langann re-watch queue for that occasioanlly needed bright optimism and wholesomeness kick.
Small nitpick.
I wish the music was more memorable: they're decent songs but they're not.....it's not like Fiddler on the Roof or Sound of Music or that one song from Titanic for example, where you come out of the theatre being able to sing at least a few bars of the chorus and hum along to the rest. Is it modern music? Are they doing something different?
Disney's Wish.
What a disaster.
Without going into a tirade on the poor messaging and terrible story telling..... I'll criticise the art and music instead.
"At All Cost" is played very early on in the movie, where the naive and star-struck apprentice-hopeful has a duet with the magician, and they agree that wishes are to be protected "at all cost". The animation uses glowing dancing spheres against a flat blue background, exactly like this in official lyric video for the song, just add the two character models. Visually, it's lazy and boring. We've had animated dancing spheres (and better!!) circa 1994 in short films like More bells and whistles played on ytv's Short Circutz, and 3D characters dancing with rendered 3D background since at least Beauty And The Beast 1991!! It's insane they think this is releasable by the biggest movie company in 2023!
It wasn't the only song like that either. There was at least one more song that had flat "white specks on blue" background. And then there was a chicken dance number where it's just 3D chickens, copy pasted and mirror flipped.
Fast forward until you see chickens. Note the bare stone flooring with not a strand of hay. We had better textures on rusty crates in Half Life (1998).
https://youtu.be/81Wr9Gq6KtY
It's lazier than 1990's dancing teapots.
Lazy lazy lazy.
And I don't mean the animators: I'm sure they were fed two crackers for supper and told to have this done by the morning.
The storyboarding and character's lines were even lazier than the animation, if you can believe it.
This is about an old movie.
I recently watched the original Rocky again after not seeing it for years. Spoilers if you never saw it.
Like many 1970s movies, the pacing seems very strange. There are scenes that don't seem to have much purpose, except maybe setting the backdrop in a "slice of life" way. Then the movie ending is kind of abrupt. The fight only last 10-15 minutes, then he wins, and his girlfriend rushes into the ring and they tell each other that they love each other. So I guess it's a love story? But I thought it was about an underdog persevering. Weird that the fight was such a small part of the story. I understand why, but a modern movie would have way more boxing scenes and they wouldn't look quite as fake.
I think it's a good movie, but it definitely is very loosely structured compared to most modern movies which are usually more efficient on having scenes that clearly advance the plot or are very obviously meant to foreshadow something. I feel like in the last few decades there is a lot more common knowledge about movies and how to structure them.
On the other hand, I like how older movies sometimes meander a bit and aren't in a rush to go through complicated plots and big special effect scenes.
A few days later I watched Rocky II, which is slightly more structured but surprisingly low budget. I would have thought that after the success of the first one there would have been a more bloated movie. This movie definitely has a clear theme more about the two personalities of Apollo and Rocky, and spends more time on the motivations of an underdog vs an established star who is having some doubts about himself. There is also a big sub plot about how Rocky retired due to a possibly dangerous eye injury. But this doesn't seem to matter in the end, and as far as I can remember this isn't a plot point in Rocky III, which I'll be watching in a few days.
Funny you say that, because that pretty much describe why I often have problems with many modern movies. They are too structured. Everything is foreshadowed somehow, the plot must be advanced in every scene and so forth. Frankly, too many have movies have too much plot. Simple well executed premises often work better than tons of side-plots in my opinion. It also make many movies very predictable because the scriptwriters all follow the same formula.
Like Rocky - it isn't really about boxing. It isn't overly important if he wins in the end or not. It is a character study. It is similar to Raging Bull, another "boxing" movie that isn't really about boxing.
I've just experienced Altered States (1980). Return to monke: the movie. It was a very pleasant surprise. It's not lowly rated, but it being an 80s "horror", I expected cringeworthy camp overload. Don't get me wrong, it is beyond campy, but the rest makes it perfectly worth it.
The commentary track for Barbie with Greta Gerwig is pretty good. She breaks down influences, some tricks, lots of art department stuff, and more. Pretty good.