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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 enjoyed The Wild Robot more than I expected! The original trailer looked incredibly generic, but while the movie has a lot of common tropes it manages to cover all of them pretty polished. The adults also had a lot of good stifled laughs at the dark jokes... there were a couple surprises haha.
We listened to the audio book on a road trip prior to seeing it. While they do switch some characterizations and events from the book, it was in service of fitting more of the themes from the long-winded book into the shorter movie.
Very good movie for kids and adults, and the last movie from DreamWorks own animators. Definitely recommend!
With Blow Out (1981) and The Conversation (1974), and not including Alan J. Pakula's 'Paranoia Trilogy', what would be a good film to complete the unofficial trilogy?
Das Leben der Anderen (2004) perhaps.
heck yes! that's a good add.
I finally saw Megalopolis yesterday. I thought it was terrible.
I am of the opinion that if this came out 10 years ago it’d be universally panned rather than the polarizing film it is now.
I can maybe understand why someone would like or love this. But I just don’t see anything here. Something being ambitious doesn’t make it worthwhile, when the form is bad. I remember seeing some tweets saying this has some of the most beautiful shots someone has seen, I didn’t see any of that. I don’t think anything in this is as pretty as The Bikeriders.
People always say they prefer a big swing and a miss over something playing it safe but I’m not like that. I prefer watching a story I’ve seen before done well than something “original” done poorly. It’s why The Bikeriders and His Three Daughters are some of my favorites of the year
The only highlight for me is Aubrey Plaza. And that’s just cause I find her attractive.
Coppola has made some of my favourite films and I have massive respect for him as an artist so, despite the largely negative reception, I made a point of going to see it tonight, with expectations tempered but mind kept open. And, unfortunately, it is indeed an absolute mess of a film. It felt like watching a sketchbook of ideas, as if Coppola had a load of themes, topics and visuals he was really passionate about expressing but couldn't wrap them up into a coherent work and decided to plow through regardless - or else he hit the mark in a way very, very specific to his own mind.
I'd be very curious to hear what exactly the actors themselves had envisioned they were signing up for originally. It's a hell of a stacked cast, and they did all seem to be on the same page, more or less.
I think most of the cast did this just to work with a legend. A filmmaker like Coppola can really coast on the films he made in the 70s and 80s. Some of the actors are "cancelled" and are open to any type of work (Jon Voight, Shia Labeouf, Dustin Hoffman) which was intentional on Coppola's part.
Oh for sure, being that this is likely Coppola's last big project then it's a no-brainer in that sense, but in my original question I was thinking more along the lines of how they were interpreting it from a craft perspective.
To play devil's advocate, I have been enjoying the YT channel of journalist Damien Walter for his quite thoughtful takes on various sci-fi media and he recently posted a very positive piece on Megalopolis. I think he presents some sound arguments in the film's favour and articulates them quite well, though I still feel that everything is too on the nose and ham-fisted in execution to work as effective satire.
Apparently, I have been struggling a little with Asian movies lately.
I saw Past Lives yesterday and I completely fail to understand why this was one of the highly recommended movies of 2023, but I am clearly in a minority here. Right from the hokey first scene, I felt like I was watching a well produced parody of a whimsical indie romance drama film. Abstract spa music and drenching everything in sunset colors doesn't make it artsy, more like it is mocking the type of movie it tries to be. I can see the inspiration from and why it gets compared to Linklater and Wong Kar-wai, but this is so far from those. The dialogue is horribly expository, clunky and unconvincing. It does have brief moments where the actors shine through, and I could see some potential for it not being a typical "right person, wrong time" type of story with its elements of reflection of living different lives in different countries and with a new language, but that was not explored nearly deep enough to really stand out.
Earlier this week I watched to two super long epics by Taiwanese director Edward Yang, A Brighter Summer Day from 1991 and Yi Yi from 2000. Theoretically I should love this as both takes their time do make a very personal personal portrait of regular people and their lives with a slow build up to a dramatic ending, but the directional choice kept everything at a distance, so they didn't have the emotional impact I felt they should. Yi Yi probably worked best for me, as each individual was less important and it was more a portrayal of a whole family with a very realistic depiction of personal drama with good and bad events.
Some weeks before I had similar experience with some films by the well regarded Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke, A Touch of Sin, Ash Is Purest White and Mountains May Depart, that also has a grand scope spanning many years combining personal drama with a backdrop of Chinese industrial development and societal changes in the past decades. An unique combination with some hidden political critque, but like with Edward Yang's films I failed to find any of the characters really interesting. Very emotionally distant. And I don't really have any better to put this, but I guess is simply comes down to that I am more used to looking at European-ish faces than Asian, so while I can read a ton from subtle facial expressions normally, that culturally doesn't translate well for me to other parts of the world, making it harder to really connect with. That has more to do with me than the films, so I would still recommend them to anyone interested in Chinese or Taiwanese cinema, especially Yi YI.
As someone who is relatively new getting into movies, could someone please recommend a super hero movie? I'd like something where the plot will make sense to me without prior knowledge of the characters or universe, but since nobody seems to number movies in the genre, I can't even tell which ones are new or old without looking things up and risking spoilers.
The first Iron Man from 2008 fits the criteria.
Depends what you're in the mood for.
For more a comedic take, I'd recommend The Suicide Squad (2021) and The Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy. Both are James Gunn productions so if you end up liking either of these, I'd also suggest checking out his TV show with John Cena, Peacemaker.
For more serious tones, Logan (2017) or The Batman (2022) are some of my favorites.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) are some of the best films that animation has to offer, superhero or not.
I mean there’s The Dark Knight if you haven’t seen that.
Something a little more unconventional is Constantine. It's a standalone film. Veers into some pretty dark places, but one of my favorite movies, period. Keanu Reeves, Rachel Weisz, Tilda Swinton.
That is a comic book movie but im not sure I’d count it as a superhero movie
Good point, I conflated the two and answered the wrong question.
I really want to argue that if Batman is a super hero, then Constantine is too. But that strays into "um actually" territory, and I should just admit that I was wrong.
But I stand by the claim that it's still a great movie regardless of category.
For a bona fide classic of the genre go with Superman (1978), it still holds up really well and is as good of an introduction as any I reckon. Plus it has that iconic John Williams score.
For a more modern flavour that can also be enjoyed without prior context go with X-Men (2000), Spider-Man (2002) and/or Iron Man (2008). These set the blueprint for the massive boom in super-flicks over the past 15-20 years. Gotta get some Batman in there too, either of Batman (1989) or Batman Begins (2005) will fit the intro bill.
On the other hand, if you want to get away from that recent class of pop culture juggernauts and try something a bit different, The Crow (1994), Unbreakable (2000) and Chronicle (2012) are all well worth a watch.
Chronicle is a good standalone superpower movie? Maybe not entirely superhero, but its done pretty well.
I watched Joker Folie a Deux yesterday. It was an interesting movie overall. I loved the cinematography, but not the fact that it was most interesting in fantasy scenes. Actually, most of the interesting scenes in the movie did not actually happen. I felt a bit cheated.
I was ambivalent about the whole musical shtick, but I appreciated that it was a musical only for Arthur and Lee, but not for any other character. So this whole angle was a bit quirky and easier to swallow.
Would I see it again? Not really, I don’t think it’s very rewatchable. Mostly because it’s a character study and the narrative doesn’t go to too many places.
But the best thing about it is something I haven’t seen being discussed. Years ago, I was reading this book called Totem & Taboo by Freud. In it, he was talking about the concept of mana, and how this quality was ascribed to some specific person. This person would go on and become the ruler of the tribe, but by doing so they would be subjected to a big set of rules. Rules that describe how a person with mana has to behave, think, act, live their life. The minute they would step out of the bounds of this framework was the moment they would be disposed of, and another person would be put in their place.
Arthur became an unwilling, powerful symbol for a mass of Gotham citizens. Joker’s power was so great that he simply had to make a remark on TV (“I came here wanting to blow up this place”) and some person, completely unknown to him, would come next day and enact exactly this remark (blowing up the courthouse)
Strangers would also try to save him from the authorities following this event, even though objectively he was not a leader or anyone who achieved anything of note. He was simply a murderer. But his entire persona struck a chord with many people, so he got ascribed all this mana & authority.
But the moment Arthur went against these unspoken rules - he stopped singing and acknowledging Joker’s persona, was the moment he was discarded and another took his place.
I really enjoyed this angle of the story, so I thought the ending was great. The movie was also trying to say other things about media, publicity and the whole cult that develops around shocking criminals. However, I felt that this parallel between Joker as a symbol & the consequences of going against this, was the most gratifying plot point. It could have been a shorter or more concise movie & message though.