11
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.
Just some quick thoughts about recent viewings.
Relay - 7/10. Very very good until it wasn't. Gripping and immersive and great stuff all around except for the poor ending.
Caught Stealing - 6/10. An entertaining attempt at a vibe similar to something like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
Glengarry Glen Ross - 7/10. I was not entirely hooked on it in the first act but then it started clicking. Incredible writing.
The Miseducation of Cameron Post - 8/10. Great coming of age movie, really good characters all around.
Bastarden - 8/10. (English title: The Promised Land). Great film from my own country which hopefully if anyone is reading this would get curious by me namedropping Mads Mikkelsen and look it up! It's not an epic but it felt like one.
A Real Pain - 7/10. Pretty good conversations-and-talking movie. Interesting relationships that they built.
October Sky - 7/10. A little derivative at times, but inspired awe and wonder in a way not many other movies do.
Freaky Tales - 7/10. Consisted of 4 points of view which made it more like 4 short films than 1 normal length movie. Very over the top fun flick!
Yeah Relay really suffered from the ending. I dont even think it’s the content so much as the way is shot and blocked dissipated any tension. I really loved Caught Stealing, it’s like a darker version of After Hours
thanks for posting these every week!
Phantom Thread (not Menace, as my muscle memory insists) tonight. I love this film. I don't know a lot about film stock, but I do appreciate that one of the stocks used allows them to stress the exposure in low light without getting a lot of additional grain... neat stuff. Amazing that new film is still being invented and improved.
PTA loves commentaries but stopped doing them. I really wish he'd pay into that. One for Boogie Nights was just him and was great where the other was a total gong show; still good, but an absolute mess. Magnolia had a little featurette where he talked about getting everybody to watch Network and some other films... and it's good, but not the same.
I think I'm going to continue doing director's filmographies. It's neat to see how their craft evolves.
edit: I love her short sleeved green sweater in the end
Some highlights from the NYFF: House of Dynamite, which received raves from it's Venice Film Festival premiere, got more muted reactions here. In fact it seems like people laughed at the ending. The hype for it really deflated for Netflix. I think this positions Frankenstein to be their priority for the season considering it got good reception at Venice and better reception here stateside.
Is This Thing On? Received positive reception. Consensus seems to think it's a more minor work and not enough to be a contender. I disagree with this mentality. But it's Searchlight, and they have a guaranteed spot every year. They did purchase The Testament of Ann Lee, months after it's premiere at Venice, but that's a polarizing film. I'm probably wrong but I think they'll push Is This Thing On? At the very least they can get Screenplay and Picture.
That seems to be the big changes throughout NYFF.
The Green Book showed up on Stremio. Within five seconds, I knew what it was about. A feel-good movie so universal in its appeal that anyone but David Duke would get behind it. Not a great film. Not bad either. You feel like you're a better person just by watching it.
The feel-good moments feel forced. It's a true story, but tweaked for maximum effect. Shame on you for not shedding a tear! As a black man, I guess I feel represented. The thing about being considered sometimes not black enough rings true. I was surprised to learn this won Best Picture.
It's not a bad film, but in Brazil this would be Sessão da Tarde material. The Oscars are about lots of stuff, and that movie feels engineered to hit all the right notes. It is a comfortable anti-racism piece for white audiences to watch because all the racists in the movie are long dead.
I guess being a true masterpiece is not that important to some awards.
There was a huge meltdown in the film community when it won Picture over Roma (which was at one point the front-runner). All the criticisms you give are the criticisms the film critic community at large had for it. It played very well with audiences though, won TIFF People’s Choice and made 300M at the worldwide box office (something a movie of this type can’t make today).
I quite like it. I think it’s a great piece of entertainment with in the pocket performances. It’s also very memorable with a lot of lines that I can still recall today. A lot of people consider it one of the worst Best Picture winners ever but I disagree. It’s better than the film that inspired it: Driving Miss Daisy.
It’s also an interesting film because it’s Peter Farrelly’s first film without his brother. And it’s the follow up to what many people consider one of the worst movies of all time Movie 43. It’s also his first dramatic film after doing pure comedies like Dumb and Dumber and Shallow Hal. So he went from being derided to being an Oscar winner in five years.
I was entertained. I could watch Viggo Mortensen's bad mafioso impression all day for comedic value alone. But it feels more like guilty pleasure than Best Picture, that's all.
The worst best picture in my time was Crash and the reason I stopped caring about the Oscar's. Crash is worse than that in my memory. I won't watch again to check.
Oh yeah Crash is definitely worse. It’s so weird because Paul Haggis (who wrote and directed Crash) also wrote the screenplay for Million Dollar Baby and Casino Royale. So I don’t know what happened there.
I think with Crash he had way too much message to convey about society and maybe that is not his strong suit. Some people do it well, like Costa-Gravas or Aaron Sorkin. It's a skill.
Watched Ocean's Eleven (2001) for the first time this weekend. What a movie! This movie's been on my radar for years. The trilogy came out as I was growing up and I remember the marketing around Ocean's Twelve and Ocean's Thirteen. As work's a bit slow at the moment, I thought I'd knock this trilogy out.
Decent story, great cast, and amazing soundtrack. I honestly have no notes for the movie other than that Don Cheadle's cockney accent is hilariously bad and kinda took me out of it from time to time. Heard that in the sequels it does improve, or at least is used more for comedic effect. I'll see how true that is when I watch 12 and 13 later this week.
The Black Phone 2
I really liked The Black Phone in 2022. I thought it was a nice, tight, contained thriller with a supernatural twist. It was simple and effective, with good child performances and a great Ethan Hawke performance to anchor it. This is not very good. It's still well made, I think Derrickson is a strong technical hand; I even enjoyed his work on The Gorge earlier this year.
This is so convoluted. Needlessly so. It feels too long; a lot of it feels silly. The original had allusions to spirituality and vague concepts of an afterlife. But this is super Christian. There are some interesting ideas here and some effective moments, but not nearly as good or as memorable as the original. In a way, it's very old school with the way it tries to expand the limited lore of the first.
Here's where we start trailing off: Mason Thames is in this. He was the kid in the first. He was also Hiccup in the live-action How to Train Your Dragon film that was released this summer. He also has a Colleen Hoover adaptation, Regretting You, where he stars alongside Grace McKenna (who's also another rising star). So he's having a pretty banner year with three studio films that are likely to be financial successes. He's also only 18 years old, which is insanely impressive.
So at work recently, a co-worker of mine came back from maternity leave, where she said she watched a show, and the main guy looked like me. She was referring to Noah Centineo. For those of you who don't know, Centineo got extremely famous and had a big moment in 2018 after the release of To All The Boys I've Loved Before. He plays the main love interest, Peter Kavinsky, who's a popular kid but who has emotional depth and intelligence. The film is based on a series of books written by the woman who also wrote the novel series The Summer I Turned Pretty. Something Centineo and I have in common is that we're often compared to Mark Ruffalo. Which is why we look alike ourselves, and all three of us sound the same and even have the same mannerisms.
So, it got me thinking about some alternate world where I was an actor and started acting as a child (or teenager or whatever), and in this alternate world, I don't gain over 100 pounds and stay over 300 lbs for seven years, and instead I'm just fit the entire time. And what if I got cast as Kavinsky in To All The Boys instead of Centineo? Because Centineo had this moment. And he squandered it by continuing to do Netflix bullshit like Sierra Bourgeoss is a Loser and The Perfect Date.
I would still do some of the stuff Centineo did, which was the Calvin Klein ad campaign (because I both would like the money and I'm incredibly vain). I also wouldn't have a problem playing up the whole "internet's boyfriend" thing.
But instead of saying yes to more teen romcoms, I would try to immediately pivot into more serious stuff. The only indie in 2019 that I could find that I could have had a role in would be Waves (2019) in place of Lucas Hedges. But I would also do an off-Broadway drama to earn both credibility and hone the craft. Also, at the time, in real life, I had this script titled "Graduation." It was written to be one shot (like Birdman or 1917), but it took place during a high school graduation ceremony. I wrote it to be about 80 minutes long, and it follows three distinct characters and how their high school world basically crumbles as they transition into adulthood (they lose friends, break up with their boyfriend, etc). So at the time I was about 18/19, so I would also use that newfound capital to try to get that funded (probably by Netflix), it wouldn't have been more than like a million dollars. I would leverage that newfound fame and good looks to get the project I actually cared about off the ground (not that To All The Boys isn't good, it is, you should watch it if you haven't, it's cute).
And I thought all that because Centineo's career isn't good, at least not what you would expect from that explosive moment. He's not taken seriously, and he's not even a big blockbuster star either. I feel like there was a lot of potential there for him to be something more. Part of that is the projection of my own inadequacies. But you see what Thames is doing with this year alone: a big franchise film, a horror film, and a romantic drama. That's setting him up to be a versatile actor and to have a more sustained career than just being a flash in the pan.