7
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.
Does anyone want to talk about:
Spider Man 3 (2007): ★★☆
I see why this is generally rated lower than the first two Raimi Spider Man movies, but I still enjoyed it. By the third movie in the trilogy, the novelty had worn off a bit, and the new things they tried to keep it fresh don't quite work as well. It also doesn't tie up all the loose ends and plot threads. This makes sense for a comic book where there are regular new episodes, but it's a bit disappointing to end a movie series that way. Maybe they were planning to make more movie(s) in the series, but stopped for some reason?
Juno (2007): ★★☆
I had heard of of this movie through quotes and references, but didn't actually know what it was about. So I read the premise and went "Meh, interesting enough." I've finally watched enough movies to start catching certain twists before they happen in movies I haven't seen before. So I'm kinda proud of immediately knowing that a certain character was lying by omission about something that was revealed as a twist later. Woo hoo media literacy/genre savvy!
I noticed that the movie is apparently set in 2008 despite being filmed and released in 2007. First, there's a calendar in the background where the dates correspond to weekdays for 2008, but that could have been a mistake. But later on, there's a custom-built prop (not saying what for spoiler reasons) literally dated 2008. Does anyone happen to know the story here? Did they originally plan to release the movie later?
It does show its age in certain ways, e.g. outdated slang. It was kinda funny to see JK Simmons play a calm and supportive dad in this movie after watching him as the crass newspaper manager for three Spider Man movies in a row right before this.
One Battle After Another (2025): ★☆☆
This is what all the fuss is about?
I'm afraid that people will assume all the wrong reasons when I criticize this movie because much of its discussion elsewhere is about its political themes, so I'm not sure if I should even try to voice my non-political disappointments. I'm not the most articulate person in the first place, so I really don't want to become a lightning rod for arguments about the movie, but I do want to talk about it if possible. Please remember that my score isn't strictly a measure of how good the movie is, but how much I enjoyed watching it. Maybe my experience would have been better if reviews and its Letterboxd/IMDB/Metacritic/Rotten Tomatoes scores weren't so high and set the wrong expections. But all that said, I'm pretty disappointed.
First, the theater experience was bad bordering on ridiculous. When I walked up to the ticket booth three minutes before the posted start time, only one other seat was reserved. By the time the movie started at least, there were maybe eight or ten of us in the theater. One couple sat right behind me in the next row (fair enough, centered with the screen). They took care to whisper to one another, but didn't seem to notice that their snacks were in the noisest bags possible. During the second-to-last trailer, another single person came in and sat right next to me despite the entire rest of the row being available. This person took their phone out frequently during the movie. Finally, the movie didn't start until 24 minutes past the posted time. My local theater typically keeps it to 15 minutes, which isn't so terrible. 60% more trailers were not a welcome surprise before a long movie.
So the theater had an off day and lost a star from me, but surely the movie was going to be good, right? Uhh... I didn't really enjoy that very much either.
Spoilers in elaboration
The antagonists felt cartoonishly exaggerated to the point of breaking my suspension of disbelief. I had the same issue with a character in The Long Walk. It felt like watching a Looney Tunes character in an otherwise-serious movie. That ruined it for me because it kills the tension of the action/thriller scenes. A big part of the reason the runtime is so long is because it lets suspenseful sequences simmer for a while, but it's just boring when your villian feels like Wile E Coyote and Marvin the Martian. During the long scenes meant to be tense, I was just waiting for the next shoe to drop because I didn't feel any sense of risk or stakes.
I also never particularly liked the protagonists either. Willa is disrespectful to Bob (beyond just throwing his snark back at him) and breaks his rules about bringing her friends to their house and having a cell phone. It's totally reasonable and believable for a teenager, but it doesn't make me like her character. Bob means well, but paranaoia and drug issues are not endearing traits. When push comes to shove, he does do the right things to the best of his ability. He is the best of the protagonists. Perfida is either irresponsible or actively misanthropic to everyone until she gets captured by the army, at which point she cracks under the pressure. Again, totally understandable, but it doesn't make me like her character. So the ending being a heartfelt letter from her didn't tug at my heart strings. She totally could have changed and become a better person by the end of the movie! But since we don't see that happen at all, it falls flat.
The movie is also long enough that I had to miss two minutes to run to the bathroom. I left right after Leo gets the gun and yells "Viva la Revolucion!" and came back as he was running on the roof. The immediate scene when I left seemed to just be an action sequence with the army searching and closing in on Leo, which makes sense based on what happened on the roof, but maybe I got unlucky and missed some important dialogue or plot development.
But if those things don't bother you, I can see how other people can enjoy the movie. I still don't quite see how it was top-20-something with all-time greats on Letterboxd for a while. It has since dropped to 80-something, but I still didn't enjoy it nearly as much as other movies near it on their list.
Cleopatra (1963): ★⯪☆
My internet went down and the company didn't fix it for three days, so I decided it was a good time to knock this 4-hour movie out of my backlog. I was mostly interested in the first place because of its historically-disastrous production. It may as well be two separate movies instead of one long one with an intermission similar to Kill Bill. It's interesting to see the huge scale of some of the establishing shots knowing that they had an actual crowd of hundreds extras on a set (and you can tell where the set ends and a matte painting begins). Today, they would just use green screen for most of it, but back then they did it for real. The movie itself was just okay, but it sated my curiosity about "this is that movie that had all those problems while filming."
Zootopia (2016): ★★☆
I watched this to see if I'd be interested at all in the upcoming sequel. My secondhand disc had some scratches and skipped over about 90 seconds of one scene. The themes are delivered a bit hamfistedly at times, but it's a kids movie, so whatever. The references to The Godfather by Mr. Big were funny. This was entertaining enough that I'll consider watching the sequel unless the reviews are bad. I'll watch the trailer for the new one again once my internet is finally fixed since I'll recognize the returning characters now.
Blazing Saddles (1974): ★★☆
I has been without internet for almost 3 full days at this point and was really frustrated with the internet company, so I picked a comedy. I think this is worth contrasting with my criticism of One Battle After Another. This also has the cartoonishly absurd antagonists, but since the whole thing is a farce, it just works and doesn't ruin the experience. I was aware that this was "a movie that you couldn't make today," and it lives up to that reputation. The language and sexual content was significantly stronger than I was expecting from a movie made in 1974. And by the time it ended, I only had to wait on hold for another 45 minutes before I could get through to a real customer support person at the internet company! /s
Spirited Away (2001): ★★⯪ (re-watch)
My theater was showing this as a part of its Ghibli series over the summer and fall. This didn't quite have the same magic as the first time I watched it, but it was still thoroughly enjoyable. I noticed a lot more of the characters' visual designs this time, like e.g. Chihiro having pencil-thin limbs. I also came away with a different impression about a couple characters, but I won't go into detail to avoid spoilers. This reminds me that I need to finally get around to watching Princess Mononoke for the first time.
Spider-Man 4 was planned to release in 2011 and would have featured John Malkovich as Vulture and Bruce Campbell would have played Mysterio. Raimi and Sony couldn’t see eye to eye after he was disillusioned with how much control he lost on Spider-Man 3. Plans for the fourth film were scrapped and they decided to reboot the franchise to keep the rights, which led to The Amazing Spider-Man releasing in 2012.
In terms of your OBAA thoughts, I’ll try to keep it vague since I don’t want to do the whole spoiler tag thing. I think the daughter’s character is just a teenager, and teenagers tend to do unlikable things. DiCaprio’s character is a love letter to the burnout generation that is GenX. Penn’s character is a satirical character of American fascists. He’s inspired by The Great Dictator, Duck Soup, and The Producers to some extent which is why he’s more comedic.
I think it’s a beautifully made film with a lot of technically impressive sequences.
I get what you're saying about OBAA, and maybe I'm just bad at interpreting cinema. The protagonists are portrayed realistically as complex people, but that didn't particularly make me like the characters (except DiCaprio a little bit). Then their juxtaposition with the ridiculous villains is part of what took me out of it. I get what they were trying to do with the characters, but it didn't "work" as a cohesive whole for me.
I don't like how political the discourse around OBAA has become. I loved it for movie reasons and don't think it was a particularly political movie. Just because it somewhat reflects the current political reality in this country doesn't mean it's trying to make some grand political point.
Anyway, I think it's okay for a character like Lockjaw to be an exaggeration of what what you might expect from reality. That's part of the fun of movies (in my opinion), they're not real! It's fun to think about why a character was written a certain way, or why the actor acted a certain way, even if it's not "realistic". If I want an accurate depiction of reality, I can watch a documentary.
Your thoughts on the protagonists make me think this movie (and many others like it) just wasn't for you. If you need likable protagonists and a nicely wrapped up story where there are clearly identified good guys who face some challenges, but always "win" and better themselves along the way, I think we just have a different approach to movies (which is okay!).
P.S. I empathize with your bad movie theater experience. I've noticed people behaving progressively worse at movie theaters over the last few years, even at Alamo Drafthouse! It drives me crazy and really detracts from my enjoyment of the movie.
I think the film is too overt in its political substance for it to not be considered political. The main characters are revolutionaries and the antagonist is a Nazi who’s attempting to join a powerful club of other Nazi’s. The basis of the film is political, the inciting incident is based on the film’s politics, its humor comes from satirizing the political beliefs of the characters (there’s even a ribbing of people who are too woke).
The Criterion Collection is having it's every-six-months 24-hour half-off sale tomorrow! I'm looking to improve my stock of movies from the 40s and 50s. Is anyone else excited?
Following up my post from last week's thread, I watched Ocean's Twelve (2004) pretty much immediately after watching Ocean's Eleven. I definitely think 11 was a better movie overall than 12, but still a nice heist movie. You can tell the cast were just having fun filming it. Don Cheadle's cockney accent was slightly better in this one compared to the last. It also seemed to be played up more comedically than the last movie, which made it less annoying to listen to. Next up is Ocean's Thirteen (2007)!