Midweek Movie Free Talk

My wife and I watched The Fall Guy over the weekend. I love Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt so this was right up our alley. I thought it was cute, enjoyable. An easy movie to throw on in the background for a rewatch. Light on plot, heavy on choreography and stunts, which makes sense, considering what the movie is about.

There haven't been many action romcoms in recent years that I can think of. The Lost City in 2022 is the last one that jumps out to me, but I may have missed others.

Alright the fall festivals are over. It seems this is the general consensus for what’s locked for a Best Picture nomination:

• Anora
• Emilia Perez
• Conclave
• Dune: Part Two
• The Brutalist

Seems to be the consensus top five. Stuff like Nickel Boys are still a little wishy washy, especially if Amazon ends up picking up The Life of Chuck and that ends up being a contender. Theres also stuff that skipped the fall fests like Gladiator II, A Complete Unknown, and Juror No. 2 which could end up being contenders depending on their receptions.

Blitz, the Steve McQueen WW2 film starring Soairse Ronan, is in limbo right now after being rejected from Cannes and Venice, as well as being rejected for distribution leaving to Apple distributing it themselves.

Joker 2 is dead, after its mixed reception from Venice (the same festival that acclaimed the first Joker and awarded it the Golden Lion). Pre-sales for the film also point towards a much lower gross than the first making it a box office bomb with its 200M budget.

Saturday Night was supposed to be a contender as well but kind of underperformed with critics and didn’t even place at TIFF which most people thought would win.

I'm new around here; please let me know my rambling doesn't belong in this thread.

A theater a ways away from me is showing The Matrix on Thursday. It's been a while since I've seen it, and who knows when I'll be able to see it on the big screen again, so I'll be making the drive. Over the course of eight weeks, my local theater is showing the entire Harry Potter series, which I haven't seen before. And tickets are cheap, so I may as well see them, too.

Over the past few months, I've slowly been watching more movies. I used to only play video games, but I realized that I usually prefer story-based games, and movies give you a story in two hours instead of twenty. So I went to a thrift shop and bought a bunch of $1 DVDs of movies I could remember hearing about, but hadn't seen. That was a success, so I'm thinking about doing it again.

I didn't plan to, but I ended up watching a couple of Brian De Palma films. Starting with Blow Out from 1981 starring John Travolta playing a sound engineer on low budget slasher films. One night he by chance records a car accident and he manages to rescue a girl out of the car before it sinks in the river. But the driver was killed and it turns out it was a presidential candidate, which spirals into a clever conspiracy type thriller plot. Travolta is great and the film is a great combination of stellar camerawork, homages to sleazy slasher films and a good mystery plot. Dressed to Kill from 1980 is kind of similar where it builds an interesting murder mystery with plenty of campyness that reminded me of Paul Verhoeven movies. Like with Blow Out the journey was more interesting than the destination. I really liked the build up in both films, but the final reveal of who the killers were wasn't the most interesting part. Carrie from 1976 is more teenage horror, again with great, and sleazy, camerawork and in many ways over the top acting, that all leads to a spectacular climatic scene in the end. But also very slow and dragging at times, so not as enticing as the other two.

Thief - 5/10

I just learned a word yesterday: I am a presentist. No matter how much I try, I just can't put my modern sensibilities aside. I can understand what an old movie is doing and I can appreciate it being groundbreaking or highly influential, but I can't really enjoy it.

So for example the scene where the protagonist drags a woman out of a bar while she screams and he threatens someone trying to stop him with a gun, shoves someone else, and I think he even punches a third guy before he speeds off in his car... that did not age very well. So I have to say that even if I was capable of viewing it in a non-presentist way, I just don't se how this isn't a kidnapping..? But it feels like it's played off as a grand romantic gesture (even though he is clearly an anti-hero?). That scene is by far my biggest criticism of this movie, especially because it happens so early in the movie that I just can't root for him after that. It drags everything to follow down a lot. Other points of criticism: Willie Nelson was not a good actor in this; there were some poorly performed and outright bad action scenes; story beats felt like they got skipped or happened off screen which was discombobulating, and the script felt quite shallow overall with dialogue that was at points off.

Good parts though: there were some truly beautiful shots, lending to a great atmosphere and really cool vibes throughout. There was especially one shot that got my attention, where we're on the hood of a flawlessly polished car driving through the city where the lights are reflected off the hood. I had never seen a shot like that before (or at least not noticed it) and my jaw dropped a little bit at how beautiful it was. The soundtrack was also great, I mean just perfect for the overall mood of the film. The heist scenes were really good, the tension high and it was beautifully shot - I would not be surprised if posters had been made of the final heist scene. Truly gorgeous lighting and the smoke really added to it. The words "competency porn" comes to mind even though it sounds gross lol

All in all, Thief was very much worth the watch. It was quite interesting to see it as a proto-Heat or even proto-Collateral movie, and I also read that it's an influential film in regards to others like Drive? I don't know enough about it to really talk about that though. Maybe @winther can chime in if you've seen it?

Anyway despite my rating of mediocre, I would definitely recommend it.