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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.
Looking forward to David Lynch's Dune in theater next week. As @mat suggested when I originally posted it, I already watched the spicediver fan edit. It is definitely an improvement, but I am still excited to see the theatrical release on the big screen.
I checked the seating availability at the theater last night, and it seems like there are only about ten seats taken in the whole theater. I guess it's a pretty old and niche movie on Monday after a holiday, but I thought a rare showing would draw more interest.
I managed two times in the theater yesterday. First was a family trip with the kids to see a Peppa Pig "movie". That was... something. I have seen my fair share of Peppa Pig and it is often pretty okay and sometimes amusingly funny, but this random group of episodes was really a drop in quality. Maybe they have new writers or something but it was lacking in many aspects and it didn't look like the kids were that much engaged.
Later I saw the new Miyazaki "The Boy and the Heron". Gorgeous animation as usual but I still struggle with grasping Miyazaki's work when it becomes very fantastical. It is clearly a very personal film for him with lots of heavy symbolism, but I may be struggling with this particular Japanese form of storytelling. It has high the ambitions with dealing with heavy topics from loss of a parent to basically the future of the world, but it didn't feel that grand emotionally for me.
I watched The Wolf of Wall Street this week for the very first time and wow, that was a wild ride from start to finish. I'd seen clips of the movie here and there but never sat down to watch the thing in its entirety. As I am sick and had some time off work this week, I decided to finally watch this thing. I was surprised to learn that this movie is 3 hours long, I guess I always expected it to be a more standard 1.5-2 hour movie. That being said, the movie packs a lot into those three hours. I'll be honest, I think this movie was a bit over-hyped to me but I still enjoyed it. It's an amazing do anything/say anything, balls to the wall, go for broke raunchy comedy. I think this is definitely some of the best acting I've seen from Leonardo DiCaprio and Johan Hill.
Saw Showgirls. I completely blanked that RLMs video on it got posted like two weeks ago.
I know the history of the film. It was considered a terrible film, it got pummeled by critics, an it won a bunch of Razzies. That was the reputation of the film until like maybe 5ish years ago. Maybe a little longer at this point. But it's been reappraised as a feminist masterpiece.
I went in really wanting to love it. I am a straight guy, and I say that cause I feel like that excludes me from the primary groups that have reappraised this film. But I do like exploitation films, and Tarantino really liked this. However, this fell flat for me.
I don't think the social commentary is strong, or insightful, or groundbreaking. And honestly, I think if this came out today the people who have reappraised the film for being feminist commentary would have criticized it for being sexist and exploiting the actresses. I think that initial pummeling, and the Razzies giving it so many awards, is the reason it got reappraised so hard. Maybe an over-correction on people not realizing the satire at the time. In the scenario none of that happened and this came out today, the only way it would not get labeled as sexist is if it was directed by a woman.
From a technical perspective it's very good. Berkley was brave in taking this role. And she really gives it her all, the physicality of what she was doing is not easy. It's just a poorly written film. Berkley's character is poorly written, inconsistent, and not terribly interesting.
I'm overall pretty disappointed in it.
I decided to sign up for the Criterion Channel's 7 day free trial and randomly blind-watch movies that I've never heard of before every day to evaluate if I want to pay for a full year.
Trigger warning: suicide, murder
Last night I watched Plan 75--the premise is the Japanese government starts a program in which anyone 75 or over becomes entitled to free assisted suicide in an attempt to help curb the country's rapidly aging population problem. Investigating the movie a bit after I finished watching, I learned that it was at least partially inspired by a real-life event (possibly even depicting it in the opening scene) in which someone murdered a bunch of elderly people at an assisted living facility in what he believed was a good deed, ridding Japan of people who he felt were a drain on the country.
The film is glacially paced and very character-focused, following the experiences of a few different characters from various different vantage points. I thought the premise was super interesting, but the film didn't really explore it in particularly interesting ways--I could think of at least a few angles that would have been way more interesting to explore that it didn't really touch on. I got the impression that it was more interested in tugging at heart strings than really making you think too much.
Great performances all around though, and it's gorgeously shot, so overall I still enjoyed it. I'd recommend it if you're not adverse to slower-paced character dramas.
I am a huge consumer of Criterion Channel. Practically the only streaming I find worth paying for on its own. The other services we have in our household is through various package deals.
Sounds like a good plan just going in blind, though they also have some pretty weird arthouse movies that could be off putting. I would be happy to give recommendations if you have any general interests. Plan 75 sounds like a thing I need to add to my watchlist.
I don't mind giving weird/arthouse movies a shot if I happen to land on one. I think tonight my plan is one of the films from their Gothic Noir collection, so if you know one of those is a particular stand-out I'd appreciate a recommendation there (otherwise I'll be eeny-meeny-miny-moing it).
I haven't but please share what you find
I can't speak to any of the films specifically, but whenever Criterion has a noir collection and I'm unsure, I usually pick based on runtime. My Name Is Julia Ross and When Strangers Marry are both just barely over an hour so hard to go wrong!
I almost did that same thing, but decided on The Seventh Veil instead (which is 90 mins) because the name sounded the most interesting to me.
It was... interesting. Hard to watch, but also hard to stop watching. Pretty sure that (based on the ending) when it was released it was going for something that absolutely does not hold up today, but viewed through a modern lens it's interesting for a completely different reason. Like it was (I think?) supposed to have a heartwarming feel-good ending, which maybe played out that way at the time, but today it's just horrifying and kind of sickening. Like the whole thing was a straight psychological horror. Hard to explain without going into too much detail. Glad I watched it though.
Saw American Fiction and Saltburn this weekend. AF was the better movie, but I thought Saltburn was fun, even if the ending was farfetched.
AF is pain-porn for woke white liberals. The equivalent of Homer Simpson laughing at the black comic "He's right! We're so lame!"
Huh. I probably fall to a large extent into that “white liberal” box and had a very different experience. I adored American Fiction.
I’d call it more of like an ode to human complexity. It absolutely skewers “academic” and “intellectual” over-generalizations, and god I loved it… but it was a pretty evenhanded skewer-er. It was all about calling bullshit on stupid- in all forms, and refusing to reduce people’s experiences down to simplistic tropes. Great characters. Looking forward to watching this one enough that I can pull lines from it as opportunity arises.
Been catching up a bit on Martin Scorsese while we are watching two of his movies in the Tildes movie thing. Yesterday I saw Shutter Island and just finished The Departed. So far probably my two favorite Scorsese movies, and I am also warming up to liking DiCaprio more now. Both have very tight and well executed scripts that keeps the excitement going for their long running time. And both very entertaining as I watched them, they both end in a very sad almost depressive way, with practically no redemption for anybody in sight. Which seems to be almost a trademark for Scorsese from what I can tell. What happens on screen may look and feel exciting and entertaining, but when it is all over it is kind of a downer.
Like I said man, DiCaprio is the GOAT. You gotta watch Wolf of Wall Street. I'm not certain you'll like that cause it's long and excessive (which is the point of the film). But it’s great, my favorite of 2013, one of the best films of the 2010s, and Scorsese’s best imo.
I will at some point. My presumption is that it is like Wall Street or Billions? Buy I am sure that is wrong in many ways.
I haven’t seen either. But from what I know of them, not exactly.
So what's your take on the end of Shutter Island? Did it fail or did it work but he couldn't live with himself?
Watching a video on all the hints you probably missed during the first viewing is extra fun too.
The latter. My read on his body language when he walked away was that he accepted the people following him ready to take him in.
I watched Akira last night. The story was not what I expected, but that movie is a masterpiece, there's no other way to say it. I didn't vibe with the story until the last 1/3 or so, but the sound and the visuals just blew my socks off. There was so much detail and color in every shot, it's easily one of the most beautiful pieces of visual media I've seen.
The next movies on the list are Starship Troopers (I've been playing Helldivers recently, ha), Office Space, and Blade Runner 2049. I enjoyed the setting of the original Blade Runner (I watched it for the first time a few months ago), but I don't think it ages particularly well, so I'm looking forward to 2049.
I'm also probably going to see Dune part 2 on the opening weekend, so I want to make sure to find some time to rewatch part 1 in the next few weeks (only saw it the one time in theaters).
Fan theory: poor Things is the origin story for the oracle in The Matrix.
Bella seems to me to be an exploration of the gnostic Sophia, as is the oracle. Know thyself is also an important theme in both movies. All the weird science and colors and camera angles suggest an early version of the matrix (the simulation, not the movie). Duncan is a predecessor to agent smith, max to neo.