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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.
We are roughly half way through the year. In my opinion the quality of the films have been a mixed bag, but here's my top 3 so far:
There are other films I've enjoyed like Black Bag and Drop that would complete a Top 5, but I don't think they'll actually end up on my list towards the end of the year. There's also a chance Thunderbolts will decrease in score and end up below the other two films (as that tends to happen to films that I have an instant emotional reaction to).
As for the rest of the year here's what I'm looking forward to:
Not sure if all of these will end up in my top 10, I'm getting Inherent Vice vibes from One Battle After Another (I don't like Inherent Vice). But these seem like solid contenders for what ends up being my favorites. A lot of films with budgets over 100M.
Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning
Enjoyed this more than Dead Reckoning over all, even if I would perhaps choose to rewatch Dead Reckoning over this. It’s a fitting finale, with great action. The two big set pieces are big.
I don’t think the first hour is as bad as people say, although the montages of the previous films get overdone a tad bit.
Lilo and Stitch
I wasn’t a fan of Marcel the Shell (the directors previous film) but having a director like that at the helm gave me hope this would at least be decent. And boy was I wrong. This is one of the worst live action remakes Disney has produced.
Forget not being on the same level as Cinderella and Cruella, it’s not even on the same level as Aladdin or Beauty and the Beast. Every change made from the original is for the worse. The film is obviously cheap (having originally been made for Disney+) and the live action actors are all giving terrible performances.
It’s borderline incompetent.
I went to the new Lilo and Stitch. Meh. I don't regret going, but I prefer the 2002 original. Stitch doing Stitch things was fun, but the surrounding story was just okay. I feel like every remake has the issue where you notice changes that you don't like, but don't notice changes that you don't mind, so my initial perception is probably worse than objective.
(rant below)
I had wanted to see Mission Impossible 8 - Final Reckoning on the special gigantic screen, but my local theater only has one such showing today... at 10:30 pm. It's a three-hour movie. There will be at least 20 minutes of trailers ahead of time, so it will be almost 2 am when the movie ends. Okay, it technically doesn't come out until tomorrow. But all the scheduled showings on the huge screen for the next week start at 9:30 pm or later. Ugh.
There is a theater just over an hour away is showing it on their huge screen at a reasonable times, so I'll make a day trip out of it on Saturday. But it's still annoying that my local theater is giving Stitch their specialty screen five times per day, but Mission Impossible gets one show that ends past midnight.
I saw A Minecraft Movie with my daughter, and while I didn't have high expectations, it was still disappointing. Mostly I am just saddened by the apparent lack of ambition for telling a good story for younger audiences. In many ways similar to the Super Mario movie, with a similar plot with some quick excuse to enter "the game world" and trying to get back again. Nothing wrong with that formula in itself, but here it was just a shoestring story attached to a endless stream of mostly unrelated scenes that seemed to just be made for trailer and tiktok clips. Things don't happen because the story warrants it, or because any of the characters has something they need to accomplish. To progress the story, they use voiceover or a character explaining what is going to happen to next. Few things feel natural. There is nothing wrong with dumb jokes, goofy scenes or even moments that are completely pointless, but it shouldn't be the meat of the runtime. To acknowledge what works: they have created a good looking world in Minecraft-style which is pretty successful. I also did enjoy the relationship between Jack Black and Jason Momoa. They did provide a few genuine laughs from me.
After finishing season 2 of Andor yesterday, I watched Rogue One this afternoon again for the first time since before Andor season 1.
Man, Tony Gilroy fucking rules. It was a little jarring for Andor to feel like somewhat of a secondary character in this after Andor, but he still steals every second that he's on screen. Gilroy did such a great job crafting his character and fleshing out his backstory in an extremely engaging way through Andor, and coming back to Rogue One, a movie I already enjoyed before I knew any of this story about Andor's history, it just feels that much richer and more meaningful.
Andor is really the high water mark for Star Wars content. I don't know if anything will ever surpass it.
I watched three movies this and last week.
First up was Raiders of the Lost Ark. I somehow have just never seen it, it's just never come up, despite me being a huge star wars fan (you think I'd have watched it cuz lucasfilm). I loved it! It was such a dumb and cheesy action movie, but it was just perfect. I had finally decided to watch it because my local theater has The Last Crusade showing in a few weeks, so I plan on watching Temple of Doom this week and then Last Crusade in a few weeks.
Next was a rewatch of Rogue One.
Light Rogue One spoilers and no Andor spoilers
I've seen the movie a handful of times and always loved it, but holy shit does this movie rock, and even moreso after watching Andor season 2. I won't spoil Andor here (except the fact that Cassian obviously survives the show to make it to the movie), but holy cow they did a great job of feeding the show right into the movie and making sure Cassian's character lines up. It feels nearly seamless! As another commentor said, it is a little jarring to go from the pace of the show right into the movie where Cassian is now a secondary character and Jyn basically comes out of nowhere. I wonder if there was a plan to have a Jyn story in the show if they ended up going forward with the originally planned 5 seasons?I did find the movie to be much more emotional after having watched the show. You see the struggle that the heroes in the rebellion went through for years, they lived in the shadows and suffered for so long and then they finally got their chance to kick the empire in the dick at Scariff and be a real fighting force instead of fighting only like guerillas. I was crying for most of the second half, tbh, the movie is just a perfect capstone to all of the stories that take place between the start of the empire and Rogue One. It feels like a true next stage in the star wars journey (and feeding into A New Hope, obviously) and a turning point for the rebellion as a whole and I just couldn't help but to be emotional about it. Andor was so phenomenal that it completely transformed the weight behind this film.
Lastly I watched Arrival. I knew nothing about it going in and have so many thoughts still, even days later.
Arrival Spoilers
What a film, holy shit. I didn't know what to expect and a story about a linguist translating an alien language is not what I expected from a first contact story, but I loved it! I think the thing l liked most is that the story is framed so that you're feeling Louise's emotions and thoughts as she does during the film. When Abbot and Costello first demonstrate they have a written language, you're just as shocked as Louise at first and then your brain goes into trying to figure out what it means, only to realize that the language is so alien to us that you can't even begin to guess if it's a letter, a word, a phrase, or if it has no correlation at all to our own language models.I enjoyed the process of Louise and Ian figuring out the alien language, though I thought the narrated part was one of the weaker points in the film. I appreciate they took an appropriate amount of in-universe time (instead of them translating it all in a week), but it was kind of a jarring tone shift to just go through a couple minutes of narration to move the story along. That said, the second half of the movie was just absurdly good. It was satisfying to watch their understanding of the heptapod language start to fall into place while trying to balance proper translation vs the brewing shitstorm in the world. I do appreciate the film had scenes like Louise explaining as a linguist why they can't just ask "what is your purpose?" and how that could be detrimental to understanding the language.
The weakest part of the film was when the soldiers killed Abbott with a bomb and there was nearly no consequence. I suppose it was one domino that started to get the military to evacuate the area (which led to Louise YOLO'ing it into the ship), but we never saw how the military was handling those soldiers that fucked up or anything like that. That said, the framing around the scene was good, like how Costello didn't become closed off or violent after and you wonder why, but when the reveal happens that these creatures don't live in linear time, it makes sense that Abbott and Costello both already knew Abbott would die, they had no reason to be upset at Louise or to leave since they already knew what was going to happen.
I also enjoyed the multiple layers behind the visions that Louise gets. I caught on pretty early that the scenes with the child were in the future after having a child with Ian, but I thought the scenes at the start with her older child were a different child until everything clicked in place. They did a good job in the beginning of making you think that story was in the past, even after you start to figure out she's seeing the future in parts. The other future scenes like the gala scene with the Chinese general were extremely satisfying to watch and demonstrated how confusing the perception of non-linear time can be.
I can't really accurately type all of my thoughts and I'm still in love days later, but long story short is that it was amazing and is now one of my favorite films. Villeneuve has done it again.