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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 will be watching One Battle After Another later this week. But it got me thinking, what are some films that are defining to this decade. As in representative of the times.
This isn't to say I love all these films (I don't really care for either The Beast or Joker), but I think each represent certain attitudes.
Both Nomadland and Borat 2 released right in the middle of the pandemic, before vaccines were created, when the world was put on pause. Nomadland examines life after loss, something everyone experienced in the wake of COVID, a stripped down sense of life as we meander through existence. Borat 2 outright depicts the hysteria we entered during 2020s political upheaval. Everyone's brains were fried thanks to isolation that led to an increase dependence on the internet and social media for us to find connection.
Don't Look Up, originally conceived as a metaphor for climate change, ended up being a perfect metaphor for government's handling of emergencies such as the pandemic. It's energy, it's schizophrenic editing, gives us a taste of what the world was like in such a panic. It showed how our media broke down, including online publications such as Buzzfeed that simply don't exist anymore. I also love the inclusion of Ariana Grande in the film, highlighting how celebrity culture still took precedence as a form of comfort (I'm guilty of this to be fair).
Tar showed our shifting attitudes as the world got more reactionary throughout the 2020s despite experiencing hyper-progressivism in the 2010s. I don't mean governments becoming more conservative, so much as the progressive ideas of the 2010s such as cancel culture and the MeToo movement losing their steam and experiencing a long lasting backlash.
Glass Onion plays a straight forward eat the rich satire, yet because it mock Musk specifically it became more prescient than I think most people imagined. An idiot pretending to be smart, a charisma void pretending to be suave, the uncovering of how we view people like this.
The Beast examines the rise of AI and how people use it as a form of escapism as much as companies used it to replace jobs. As we've seen with recent reports people are experiencing something classified as ChatGPT psychosis. Incel culture also became mainstream this decade which is prominent in this film.
Joker: Foliex a Deux. I mean.... look at all the political violence we've experienced this decade so far. A few months after the release of the film Luigi Mangione became famous for shooting the CEO of a health insurance company. The fandom, the women that fell in love with Joker in the film, became a reflection of all the thirst posting of Mangione. This has led to some people attempting to copy this claim to fame with not as successful results.
I watched Sirāt yesterday, can recommend! Very intense movie, no real storyline, you just experience it.
The ratings for this movie are all over the place and I can see why. It helps if you like Techno music :D
The Fantastic Four: First Steps - 6/10
As far as 2020's comic book movies go, this was one of the better ones. It did campy pretty well and hit all those notes which while good also felt a little bit sterile. Highlights of the movie was Julia Garner and set designs. Lowlights (is that a word?) was Vanessa Kirby and the Thing who it's difficult to describe but both of them looked off.
ETA: apparently there's only 1 more movie in the MCU before the next Avengers film comes out, which as far as I'm concerned has had next to no build-up. It's going to be a miracle if they can actually pull it off.
One Battle After Another
Yeah I think this lives up to the hype. It's PTA's most entertaining film, meaning it belongs more with his Boogie Night/Licorice Pizza stuff rather than his The Master/Phantom Thread stuff. It's in constant motion and rarely does it stop to have those moments of introspection that PTA is known for. Characters are forced to reckon with things as they're being dragged through the events. Penn really is the stand out here, what a wonderfully weird performance.
It is absolutely gorgeous and the score is beautiful.
I've been very amused by the box office this year. It's a major turning of the tide. First we had a good Superman film, which understands that Superman is meant to be optimistic and aspirational, clobber every Marvel release for the first time since the Nolan Batman films.
And now we have the latest Demon Slayer film on a fast track to potentially beat Superman and F1 for US and worldwide sales, which is a first for anime distribution in the west. It absolutely deserves it too...Ufotable's artwork is stunning.
I saw One Battle After Another today. Despite my best efforts, I am too stupid to properly use the spoiler tag. All I will say is that I had extremely high expectations and it met or surpassed all of them. I'll probably see it again tomorrow or this weekend.
One of the funniest movies I've seen in a while. I'm a big Pynchon fan, and while this was a much bigger divergence from the book than Inherent Vice was, it still really captured the feel of his work in many ways. I was very lucky to get to see it in 70mm! I'll be making all my friends see it very soon.✋️🎅
I feel like I should mention that my star system reflects how much I enjoyed watching the movie, not a measure of how good it is. With that said, does anyone want to talk about:
The Long Walk (2025): ★⯪☆
Howl's Moving Castle (2004): ★⯪☆
It Happened One Night (1934): ★★☆
Question, I see stars and then a square box with an X in it. Is that a half star in the middle? It's not rendering right in 3 cheers
Yes, it should be unicode 2BEA for a half-star. I've never liked Letterboxd's convention of using the ½ character for a half-star, but maybe the actual half-star character is too obscure.
It doesn't render in my Firefox mobile either, so maybe it's a mobile thing. Alas
Can't see it in Chrome on Windows 10 either (but can guess what it's meant to be)
Screenshot
its weird -- half stars worked for me on Big Sur but don't with Sequoia. Probably some system-wide font replacement or something.
For Letterboxd, does it round up for you (4.5 shows 5 full stars)?
Letterboxd uses the ½ glyph instead of a half-star, but I've never liked how that looks.
What did you think about Howl's Moving Castle? Was the plot coherent?
What affected your enjoyment of it?
Spoilers
I never figured out how the magic works or its rules. This left me confused at times, keying on things that ended up not mattering and expecting those things to be relevant later. For example, the witch at the beginning says that "The best part of this spell is that you can't tell anyone about it." I expected that to be a much bigger deal than it was or lead to a reveal later on. Because I was paying attention to that, I didn't notice actual important things or understand their importance.
My score is a measure of my experience watching the movie, not necessarily critiquing its quality. I think I would definitely benefit from a rewatch in the future where I just let myself go with the flow. But I walked out of the theater feeling stupid for having trouble keeping up with a kids' movie.
Spoilers
I've had that same issue with a couple of Ghibli films, I wonder if you've noticed the same (like if the studio generally doesn't bother to explain their magic/mystical world building or if it's just their adaptations; Tales from Earthsea is another example of some pretty confusing internal rules and story). I remember reading the book and going "ohhhh, everything makes so much more sense now" (though I do love Dianna Wynne-Jones, and the book is very different in some important ways).
My biggest annoyance the first time I saw Howl's Moving Castle was the weird "flashback" (if that's what it was?) to Howl flying over a battlefield, which is disappointing because once I looked it up it was (possibly) meant as a super impactful moment that was totally lost on me. The way I remember it is: Sophie manages to help Howl in the past, and that leads Howl to help Sophie in the future, giving a whole different spin on his opening scene with her. It seems a little odd to me that so much of the film is just...not explained, or is a red herring; usually I love that in a film, and dislike heavy exposition, but it felt like some things in Howl's Moving Castle could be explained a tiny bit more.
Spoilers
I agree. Show-don't-tell is supposed to be a good rule for storytelling, but I needed my hand held a bit more for Howl's Moving Castle. Maybe part of it is Japanese cultural differences that I don't watch enough anime to understand.
First time I've ever seen a three-star rating system!
I think I've only seen Howl's once, or maybe twice with about a decade between viewings, and the last time was surely at least 10 years ago. With that caveat, it's my favorite Miyazaki movie. I've always thought it's the kind of fantasy film I'd want my kids to watch, rather than a Disney production; it approaches moral ambiguity in a digestible way while respecting their intelligence. I quite enjoyed it otherwise, and didn't have any of the qualms you or @morafim found.
I kinda just feel like I don't have enough ability to discern more than three levels:
★☆☆ - I wish I had watched something else instead
★★☆ - Worth watching
★★★ - Awesome, gets priority to rewatch
I use the half-stars when I can't really decide how I feel one way or the other, not as a designed in-between rating.
last night I watched Murder, My Sweet (1944) --- I could be wrong, but I think this might be the first post-code appearance of a gay bar.
Love this film. I really think Sam Rockwell would make for a great Marlowe -- and not only because he looks like Dick Powell.