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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.
Didn't actually want to make a separate thread for this, and I'm likely to talk about it later in the week when I watch it and when the box office comes out. But Superman's review embargo dropped today. One of the most anticipated review days of the year, Warner Bros has a lot riding on this.
Here's the result: 86% on RT and 71 on MC.
Let's compare it to recent DC films (only using MC).
Aquaman and The Lost Kingdom: 42
The Flash: 55
Blue Beetle: 61
Black Adam: 41
The Batman: 72
The Suicide Squad: 72
And compare that to Man of Steel's 55.
WB breathes a sigh of relief that for once their attempt at starting a DC cinematic universe is met with positive reception. Being closer in reception to DC's highest rated films from the past few years (Gunn's own) The Suicide Squad and The Batman.
Even the negative reviews aren't bad, it's just critics not meshing well with Gunn's style.
Over two nights I watched Killers of the Flower Moon and I think I can place it as my favorite Scorsese film. Scorsese hardly makes bad films, but this is the first one that got me a bit more than usual and closer to "great" than merely "good".
A long long epic that somehow didn't get boring, and while the story doesn't strictly need 3 and a half hours, it serves a point to show how long this betrayal was going on. It is ruthless brutal scheme worthy of the most sinister Crusader Kings players. It builds slowly, but it hit me hardest in the end, when you have that long perspective to really get how utterly despicable and evil that murderous scheme was towards poor Mollie and the Osage. Unusual to see Leo in such a role, and then we have Jesse Plemons as a hero of sorts for a change. It is admirable what Scorsese does here with doing what he can to tell this part of history, and especially how history is controlled by those in power.
Scorsese films are often ones I can appreciate for its pure craftsmanship quality, but this is the first one that rises a bit above the rest. The scope and tragedy of the story is larger here, and for me at least is more interesting than all his gangster dramas. There are also a few elements I like less, which I mainly contribute to it being an AppleTV production. It manages to look too clean and polished, despite the high production value. Lacks the naturalism and atmosphere that I got from There will be blood for example.
Coincidentally, with this the year 2023 has now surpassed 1999 which I have watched most movies from. It is hard to know what will stand the test of time in decades to come, but 1999 have for a good while been one of those massive years in recent cinematic history as a year with several incredibly good movies. I think 2023 is up there. Of course there is recency bias, but I keep finding good movies from 2023, more than so than say 2024 and 2022. Maybe a byproduct of an post-COVID surge of good projects that had been on hold for a few years.
I agree that 2023 has been one of the strongest film years in a while. I think the last time I felt like that was in 2014. 2021 had a similar rush of releases when the original 2020 delays finally came out.
Both 2022 and 2024 just didn’t have that many releases. 2022 due to the pandemic and 2024 due to the strikes. 2023 felt the most balanced and the most “normal” year for film release post-pandemic.
Haven't watched nearly as many from 2014, and while Whiplash and Birdman definitely stands out - the first John Wick too, what else make it an above average year?
Interstellar, Gone Girl, Grand Budapest Hotel, Nightcrawler, American Sniper, Boyhood, Snowpiercer, Under the Skin, Enemy, Edge of Tomorrow.
This was the year a lot of franchises also reached an all-time high (in terms of reception). MCU with Guardians of the Galaxy and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes was and still is considered the best of the series, X-Men: Days of Future Past was considered the best X-Men film at the time.
Children’s films that were extremely acclaimed came out with The Lego Movie, Paddington, and How To Train Your Dragon 2
And we got two comedy classics with Neighbors and 22 Jump Street.
And all the other films that were well received at the time even if they weren’t or aren’t considered all time greats like Godzilla, The Fault in Our Stars, Fury, Lucy. Some of which still get talked about today.
This was one of the first years were I was following films closely and what a year to do it with
All these plus a pretty good year for horror and scifi:
It Follows, As Above So Below, Predestination, Edge of Tomorrow (oh you got that one), The Voices, The Guest, Ex Machina, The Babadook, Creep, The One I Love (was 2014 the best year of Mark Duplass?)
It was a really good year for movies across the board.
I consider It Follows and Ex Machina to be 2015 releases. Since that’s when they had their wide releases, they’re considered 2014 films on the Internet because of their festival premieres. Ex Machina got its Oscar nominations in 2016 for 2015 releases as an example.
What other movies from
2023 were good?
I also watched flower moon, but didn’t really like it. I appreciate it from a cinematic perspective but I just really didn’t like any of the characters in it, even though I know Im not supposed to, and that sorta ruined it for me. I find it hard to watch something when I don’t care what happens to anyone.
Oppenheimer (not that winther was a fan of it)
The Zone of Interest
Poor Things
Anatomy of a Fall
Past Lives
Those are all the big high-brow/critic films of 2023.
Nice thats a good list, haven’t even heard of most of those.
I also didn’t like Oppenheimer, I really think that story just doesn’t make for a good Nolan film.
oppenheimer hate gang!! i thought i was alone.
The Zone of Interest
Anatomy of a Fall
Perfect Days
Barbie
Fallen Leaves
The Teachers Lounge
Afire
The Beast
Not that everything is a once in a decade masterpiece, but a general pretty high standard.
I can understand that, but how about Mollie as the poor victim of everything? Though the main focus is on the villains, so from that perspective it is a challenge in that regard
I feel like there was a point where Mollie knew her husband was involved in some way and she just buried herself in denial instead.
Like even after everything, there was that scene where she sat him down and made him admit he poisoned her. Why even talk to him? For the drama I guess?
She wasnt unique, smart, strong, or anything, she was just there and this just happened to her. I get thats how real life works but this is a movie.
Superman
I'm a believer in Gunn. I think he's something of an auteur when it comes to Superhero movies. This continues that trend. Perhaps it doesn't have the emotional depth of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3. I think that was just going to be a natural conclusion because those characters have traits that Gunn favors.
My thought process is this: Richard Donner made a Hollywood epic and injected it with 70s realism (as much as he could anyway), Zack Snyder attempted to make an operatic mythological film following in the footsteps of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight trilogy. This pulls it back, Gunn decides to make it more of a cartoon while making Superman more of a human (to contrast it to Cavill's alien interpretation).
There is a loose plot here, it plays more episodic, it has an overarching story but not as concrete as the Guardians films. The action is incredible, Gunn builds on his fluid omnipresent camera work that he's developed throughout his last two films. Mix that in with Superman's flight and you get some genuinely thrilling sequences. It is spectacle. The biggest critique in regards to the look, is the one action sequence that looks too much like The Flash for most of it. That scene redeems itself at the end though.
I do find it interesting that the last couple Superman films have been responses to the previous films. Superman Returns retconned the much maligned Superman III and IV, saying it was a return to the original two Reeves films. Man of Steel decided to do a Batman Begins story and filled the film with more action due to complaints that Returns didn't have enough and was boring. And here, we have a colorful Superman that saves everyone even small animals due to the complaints of the previous films having Superman do massive collateral damage.
This is really what I want out of a Superhero film. Out of a blockbuster really. I won't put it on the same level as, say, Top Gun: Maverick. But I'd put it on a similar level as Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Well made fun.
The Phoenician Scheme (2025) is fun... less parody of his own work than others, but still up there. I like the ground-ness of Life Aquatic -- its a good balance for his work.
I just watched F1 (2025) and I think it is a good movie! I love motorsports but after attempting to watch Gran Turismo (2023), I was skeptical about this movie. However, after many of my car enthusiast friends told me they enjoyed the movie, I figured I'd give it a chance. Overall, I think its an 7/10. I really enjoyed the cinematography of the racing sequences along with the sound design. They really captured the energy and tension of racing in my opinion. The sound design also does a great job of actually portraying what its like to feel a race car whiz past you at 150+ mph. The opening sequence is also amazing, it really caught my attention and evoked a lot of the same emotions I felt as a kid watching Cars (2006).
Disappointments with the film, spoilers ahead!
While I do think the movie is good, I think there was just so much more potential for the movie. I feel like it tries to cram in an awful lot of detail into its 2.5hr runtime. The world of F1 is complex, and I think the movie wanted to touch on all the aspects that make F1 the machine it is. However, by trying to include all these details, it never explores any of these details in depth, thus making the movie feel a bit flat.You've got:
-Sonny's 1993 Spanish GP incident and the effects it had on him
-Sonny's relationship with his father who passed away when Sonny was 13 and how much that relationship means to him
-Sonny's difficult relationship with the press
-Sonny and Ruben's complex relationship and whatever happened at Monaco
-Pearce trying to make a name for himself as a rookie
-Pearce's relationship with his mom as well as his late dad, who also passed away when Pearce was 13
-Kate's struggles of being a woman in a male-dominated field
-Kate's personal struggles as she tries to make it in F1
-Jodie (the mechanic)'s struggles to deal with the pressures of F1
-Peter Banning (the board member)'s efforts to sabotage and hijack the team from Ruben
These details are then in addition to the idea that Ruben was able to construct this team, who have the potential to win races, by finding talent in the most unconventional of places for an F1 team. There's just so many ways the movie could've gone and explored the world of F1 but it just doesn't.
I also really dislike how the female characters were written in. With Jodie, the mechanic, I can see she's supposed to be someone struggling with the pressures of F1, whose contributions are often overlooked because she's not an engineer or a driver. However, they just make her come off as this incompetent mechanic not fit for a high-pressure environment. With Kate, they really just forced the romance for her character and could've explored so much with her. She's got this incredible backstory of being a great engineer at Lockheed Martin, losing almost everything as she broke into F1 but continues to stay for her love for the sport. However, instead of giving her a natural working relationship with Sonny, sort of like Hamilton with Angela Cullen, they gave Sonny and Kate this really forced romantic relationship and it just left me disappointed.
The racing itself also isn't the greatest. While the cinematography, CGI, and sound design are all on point, the actual racing itself, at least the racing with the APX GP cars, is like Mario Kart with F1 cars given how dirty it is. Not much more to say there. Not 100% sure if this is true or not but I believe they actually ended up using some real life GP broadcast footage in the movie, just applying CGI to make cars look like the APX GP cars. It was trippy seeing scenes that I'd definitely seen on my computer before while watching GPs, just not having the cars' livery match my memory.
Adam's Rib (1949, Comedy, Romance) -- When a woman attempts to kill her uncaring husband, prosecutor Adam Bonner gets the case. Unfortunately for him his wife Amanda, also a lawyer, decides to defend the woman in court. Amanda uses everything she can to win the case and Adam gets mad about it, and their perfect marriage is disturbed by daily petty squabbles. Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, and Judy Holliday
Hepburn can do no wrong in my eyes. When we first see her, I just love how she closes the door with her foot -- its so practical and perfect for her character.
Bring Her Back
Follow up in the Talk To Me universe.
Admittedly it fell pretty far in my list of A24 bangers, but not for anything egregious. I think the setting just had me less engaged. Films like Barbarian and Hereditary and Midsommar had some delicious twists and left me hungry to discuss it but I felt a lot more impressed by the feelings evoked from this movie than the thoughts generated post-watching.
It was worth the watch, and while you won't be super rewarded for watching Talk To Me, it's still quite a horrifying film to experience, the practical shots made me more squeamish than I have been for a long while.
Now that it's out on streaming...Sinners had a lot of hype and I bounced right off it at about the halfway mark; there were a lot of strange decisions as far as technique and execution that really took me out of it: accents, compositing the twins, transitions, the sound design for moments when characters had dialogue, the sheer number of things the twins had done in their lifetime. I was never sold on a feeling of verisimilitude as a whole; though there are some great character moments that feel real the connective tissue between scenes is not enough.
I think I'd compare it to O Brother, Where Art Thou for time period, mythology, racism as a theme, and filmmaking technique (the reviews I've seen compare the hype/reward to Black Panther, but...I don't think that's a very useful comparison). I'm still working through this comparison but the themes of music as transformative, magical realism, punishment, sin, religion, "the South" generally, compositing and editing technique, racism and its opposite (inclusion)...maybe not every movie needs to be an O Brother, Where Art Thou but I wouldn't mind if it was.
Spoilers: the sawmill music mythology scene
The attempt/intent was interesting, but the result was...not good. Maybe this is an issue of streaming vs theatre, but this felt like someone trying to translate a beautifully written poem or passage into film literally and it just fell so flat. This is also the scene that I've seen praised as one of the best parts about the film. It's probably just that the "enjoys musicals" part of my brain is missing, but this stood out as the moment the director just *could not* trust his audience to understand the message and he *had to tell us*.On compositing: I can't tell if the first scene where the twins share a cigarette is intentionally badly done, but there's a big pause where they each grab the cigarette from the other. Is this supposed to be a big wink at the audience? It feels like the early scenes are calling attention to the fact that it's the same guy rather than trying to have it blend into the film.
I think it’s a very useful comparison since the director made both
I agree with you on the scene you hid in the spoiler tag. I didn’t find it to be a magical moment and I felt like it was actually out of place. People really loved it though.
I would be interested to hear what comparisons to Black Panther you find the most compelling; I should also say that everything I write about movies is opinion, rather than fact, and I should probably clarify "not a useful comparison".
For Sinners and Black Panther the obvious overlap is Ryan Coogler and "centering (his work) on often overlooked cultures and characters—most notably African Americans" (from Wikipedia), but I find the overall structure, time period, and theme of the movies are very distinct (though both focus on the connection with ancestors and culture they do it in very different ways). I think it's more accurate to say that there are other movies that I'm more interested in comparing Sinners to that are more technically competent and thematically similar.
One of the scenes/shots I keep thinking about is a really great, understated sequence that (thankfully) the director doesn't use a voiceover to explain to the audience: early on the daughter that works in the general store crosses the street...to the other general store in town, both run by the Chow family. It's a great bit of world-building that actually reminds me more of an Edgar Wright sequence than anything from Black Panther.
Well for one, this proves that the themes aren't very distinct. I'm also not sure why a film would have to be from the same time period to make a good comparison either. The only difference is structure which Sinners takes up more time in the beginning setting up characters than Coogler's other films but that element is still present. Black Panther opens up with a scene from Killmonger's childhood rather than an action scene.
The casino fight scene from Black Panther contains the same floaty long-take camera movement that Coogler uses in Sinners, specifically in the big music scene, and even in the scene you mentioned. Nor are either set to the rhythm of a song like Wright's editing technique as in the intro credits to Baby Driver or the dance scene in Last Night in Soho. From the camera movement to the blocking, Wright and Coogler are noticeably different.
That is uncanny how reminiscent the two films are for technique; Coogler is consistent, for sure.
The shot I was thinking of from Wright was the Shaun of the Dead walk to the corner store and what it does (for me, at least); it builds a lot of context for the world and it's a long (unbroken?) shot. It's a cool shot in both films that is a "show, don't tell" moment, but Coogler uses it to build the world whereas Wright uses it to build the world, then re-uses it to build the story.
I think that's what I'm getting at with "not useful"; Coogler has a visual language, but I don't really want to compare him to himself because I see other filmmakers doing similar things with different impacts, and if I find his technique lacking I'd want to move outside of his visual language for...contrast, now that I think of it, rather than strict comparison.
My *incredibly subjective* thought on theme...
...is that Black Panther is about familial secrets and the consequence of secrecy and "apartness". The supernatural/superhero aspect of the main character is passed down from father to son, and it takes an outsider to reveal the truth to the main character.
Sinners interrogates the concept of "sin", generally; wine, women, and song. There are references to the imposition of a moral order/controlling authority (Christianity, Jim Crow, vampirism) that takes free will away. The main character has the power to connect people to each other and their ancestors, and at the end has to choose between the moral order and some other path.
Both films talk about the impact of racism/colonialism in different contexts, using different mechanisms (superhero, supernatural) and for me the contexts are distinct enough that I have trouble comparing them (in a way that is useful to me).
Reviews talk about how hyped up his two films about Black Americans were and how disappointingly average they are. I referenced it in the original post because I found both films did not live up to the hype, but that's as far as I thought about it, and the comparisons to other works are more compelling to me.
100% agree; in the case of time though I couldn't compare how well Black Panther represents the '30s vs how accurately Sinners represents the '30s, but it's fun to think how cinema represents that time period and how we think of it as "accurate" and whether that helps us to believe the world we're viewing.
Off topic:
This has actually kicked off a question for me about technique generally; I am somewhat offended when I can tell that something is fake in a movie, but is that even relevant? I love when a movie is technically competent, especially when it elevates story elements, but that's probably an elitist position to take.
I don't wanna sound too grumpy but I am not sure if Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck is a documentary. I mean, there are interviews, and there are facts. There are lots of really cool footage that, I assume, where never seen before. Apparently Kurt recorded himself a lot. But there's also a huge amount of animation, abstract recreations, acting, and random Nirvana-flavored graphics. So IDK. If this is a documentary it is a very peculiar one.
Perhaps it went too far due to an oversized budget.
I would recommend this film for Nirvana and Kurt Cobain fans with some knowledge of their history. It's worth it for the home videos alone. If you're unfamiliar with them you may feel a little lost.
EDIT: You'll also listen to quite a few album versions of Nirvana songs over graphics that are not nearly as good as the music videos, which can be good or bad depending on how you look at it. I listened to those songs repeatedly since the 1990s so at a point it gets a little annoying. They could either use the music videos or live versions to keep things fresh.