9
votes
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've been watching old musicals:
Singin' in the Rain - Old-fashioned fun and deserves its stellar reputation.
Fiddler on the Roof - It seems about as historically realistic as a musical about terrible suffering could be without being completely depressing. It was made in 1971 but nothing seems dated to that time; it could have been made yesterday.
Oklahoma - Plot and characters are ludicrous. It might appeal to people who like ballet? I don't know a thing about ballet, but the dancing seems rather ballet-influenced.
La La Land - The plot is nothing special, but nicely done. Interesting dance settings.
The Young Girls of Rochefort - I don't really see why this is #1 on imdb's list but it's certainly amusing. Some pretty inexplicable things happen. (What's with the horses? The gun?)
Mary Poppins - Often silly but quite fun. I guess this was what peak special effects looked like in 1964?
Mary Poppins Returns - Imitates the original too closely, and where it's different, it's often worse. Mary Poppins would certainly not sing on stage. Special effects are spectacular but too unreal.
Saving Mr. Banks - Not a musical, but a quite good (though somewhat fictionalized) story about negotiations around the making of Mary Poppins, with Tom Hanks as Walt Disney.
Oliver Twist - Not sure how to think about it. Great song and dance numbers, mostly about villains?
My Fair Lady - Watching Henry Higgins be an overbearing, chauvinist fool is no fun; it's too extreme and would have worked better if he had some redeeming qualities. How could this villain teach anyone? But there are good scenes where his mother and Eliza treat him as he deserves. I was relieved that the ambiguous ending wasn't worse, but I don't see why there should be any hope that they get along afterwards; who could hope for that?
wrt La La Land, its worth watching The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which was a big influence.
Thanks, I did see The Umbrellas of Cherbourg earlier and hadn't noticed the resemblance until you pointed it out.
i really liked the La La Land ending. but i felt that Umbrellas captured it better in seconds.
Yeah the ending of La La Land is essentially a recreation of Umbrella’s ending. It’s Damien Chazelle’s favorite movie, this is an interview about it. It’s actually how I found out about Umbrellas.
It was interesting that La La Land essentially has two endings - you get to see the happy ending and the other one.
I thought that The Umbrellas of Charbourg was very sad in a rather predictable way. ("How did this happen?" "In the usual way, I assure you.") The most surprising thing about it was that there wasn't any plot twist preventing things from going as one would expect, given the circumstances.
The separation in La La Land seems more like a choice that could have gone either way. Why not go to Paris?
i love that kind of what-if ending… like The 25th Hour.
I like The Young Girls of Rochefort but you should watch Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Jacques Demy was actually a huge inspiration for La La Land (the colors especially).
I agree with your takes on Oklahoma and Oliver, didn’t really care for them. Though I also don’t care for Fiddler on the Roof.
I love My Fair Lady and the original film Pygmalion (I say original film it’s originally a stage play). My Fair Lady is one of my favorite musicals and one of my favorite Best Picture winners.
I love all the Mary Poppins films. I would actually say Returns is one of the best musicals of the 21st century (as shallow as that list ends up being).
The Day of the Jackal - 7/10
This being from 1973 makes it stick out for me since I don't watch a lot of movies. I had heard though that it was better than the 2024 Eddie Redmayne series and I am kind of on the fence. It did not have the high highs that the show had, but it also didn't have the low lows - it was solid throughout and while I did feel it was a good watch and very well worth the time, some things didn't quite land for me. The main character's actor never struck me as a cold hearted sociopath for example. He was much too laid back, whereas I found Redmayne's take to be so very chilling and made me tense in every scene. But those parts of the show were 10/10, so who is a 50 year old movie to beat that? In any case, it was interesting to compare! I expected it to be much more similar in plot and such than it was though so it was a neat surprise that there was nothing that had been spoiled at all.
I have been trying to watch movies from countries that are very far from what I usually seek out.
Azor is an Argentinian movie from 2021 which takes place in the 80s during the military rule. Follows a Swiss banker taking care of his business interest in the country. Most of the movie is basically just business people talking in fancy looking hotels and restaurants. Could be set anywhere in the world. There is a point to that we barely see any regular Argentinian citizens, because this shows how people with power and money have just normalized the oppressive state and are working within that to make money. The dictatorship is barely acknowledged and this made it hard for me to distinguish what separated this from any normal business deals, and that could be entirely intentional. It shows that with enough normalization, there isn't any difference if you willingly turn a blind eye to the real consequences for real people in what you are doing. In that sense, it is a bit similar to The Zone of Interest but with even more distance and subtlety.
The Romanian film Bacalaureat (Graduation) from 2016 is similar in how it takes a subtle approach to show the corruption in Romania. The premise of a father with high ambitions for his daughter as she is about to embark for studying in England and just needs good grades for the final exam, seems like a minor drama. And it is a very enclosed personal family drama, but it exposes so much of Romanian society, which makes it really unique. The father has clearly lost faith in Romania and desperately wants a better future for his daughter, which in his mind means she needs to study and start a life in western Europe. Things start with a blow as she becomes the victim of a failed rape assault attempt, which naturally puts her upcoming exam performance in jeopardy. The father seems like a good honest man, but he feels forced to enter the corruption problem of Romania. This opens up interesting dilemmas on how to stay true to ones own morals within an immoral system.
Last night I took a wild swing with a very bizarre Chilean film La telenovela errante (The Wandering Soap Opera) which is filmed in the early 1990s but edited and released after the directors death in 2017. It is an absurd anthology of seven short films with a recurring theme of soap opera and satirizing Chilean society of the time. Being pretty unknowable about Chile there are likely a ton of things I don't get, though this review from The Hollywood Reporter helped a great deal. The first 3 scenes are the best, as they are funny on their own without any knowledge about Chile or its politics at the time. The later scenes turns into Lynchain absurdity and I lost interest quite quickly. One of those oddities that I am glad I gave a chance, but I didn't get a whole lot out of it.
Unsurprisingly I got the most out of the European film, but it always fun to explore something far beyond my usual horizons.
Does anybody want to talk about any of the following?
Just Mercy (2019): ★★☆
Last Breath (2025): ★★⯪
Good Will Hunting (1997): ★★⯪
Anora (2025): ★☆☆
Top Gun Maverick (2022): ★★★
My star ratings reflects my personal enjoyment watching the movie, and I had several issues that aren't objective faults of Anora itself. To see it, I had to drive an hour to the theater, nobody was manning the box office when I got there, the seats in the theater weren't clean, and the house lights stayed on until someone walked out and complained after 10 minutes. Since the beginning of the movie is in a dark setting, nobody could see what was going on or recognize characters by their voices.
So besides that, it's been a good couple weeks of movies for me.
I watched How to make Millions Before Grandma Dies / Lanh Mah (2024) -- nice little movie.
Tonight I'm watching Night On Earth (1991)
I used to do these super early Oscar predictions, but I’ve decided to leave predictions as a one time thing in order not to clutter everyone’s feed, and also because it’s like a singular document of my predictions. I’ll do a quick prediction of next year here:
Picture
Director:
Lead Actor
Lead Actress
The Electric State
I'm not familiar with the source material on this, but the film felt like a rip off of Ready Player One. I'm not sure the Russo Brothers can function properly outside of Marvel (and honestly they haven't made another movie on par with Winter Soldier). It feels like they're trying to imitate both Spielberg and Star Wars, but that's all it feels like. Empty imitation, and not even a decent copy. It feels like they copied The Rise of Skywalker the most of any of the Star Wars films. Also, I'm not convinced Millie Bobby Brown can act.
Black Bag
The third film in a sort of spiritual trilogy from Soderbergh and Koepp (Kimi and Presence being the other two). It's a fun, tight, contained, spy thriller. There are essentially only three major locations. There is no globe trotting here. Yet it's still engaging and engrossing. It's classy. Cate Blanchett has this femme fatale aesthetic and she is gorgeous in the movie.
Will the story make sense without watching the other two movies first?
Oh yeah they’re not an actual trilogy. They're just three films directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by David Koepp. All three are exercises in genre fare, that’s their only connection.
I took my daughter to see the Oscar winning Flow and sadly it didn't live up to its very high praise I have seen and heard basically everywhere. Starting with the animation, which is impressive in its own right, but I still think it mostly looked like a long tech demo. Especially with how the camera moved around honestly gave me vibes from computer game cut scenes. For an ambitious movie like this with some big themes presented with an attempt at poetic storytelling, its origin in Blender sadly really shows. The score was also kind of generic placeholder type stuff. The one thing that did work well was the animals. They definitely felt very animal-like. Very natural and convincing. Since it is called Flow it is likely meant to be like that, but the narrative was to me barely anything more than events that just flowed together without much beginning, middle or end. And then it just becomes somewhat repetitive. It does tie into the underlying theme of "the flow of nature" and I do appreciate the core message of trust, providing help and friendship, but as a whole it was honestly rather boring.
Yeah I agree with you. I did not understand the praise Flow received, and I think it's a shame that it beat out The Wild Robot, which has more emotional depth, for the Animated Feature Oscar.
To anyone who may be interested, Criterion announced a 24-hour online-only sale coming up on Tuesday the 18th. If you want to pick up anything from their catalog, it will only cost you one kidney instead of two.