Midweek Movie Free Talk

Does anybody want to talk about:

Rental Family (2025): ★★☆

This was good. I didn't see any trailers or marketing for this, but the premise seemed interesting, so I gave it a go. It's predictable (even for an idiot like me), but it executes its concept well. A lot of the online discussions talk about how it's another movie of "Brendan Fraser being himself" in a positive sense. I haven't seen any of his other movies, but now I'm interested after seeing him in this.

I'm a bit proud that I basically immediately called a twist that, if Letterboxd reviews are anything to go by, the average viewer didn't notice until it was explicitly revealed. Yay media literacy!

If I have one criticism of the movie, it's that the flip-flopping between English and Japanese was confusing. Maybe my American is showing, but is it common in Japan (or multilingual situations in general) for speakers to switch languages back and forth multiple times mid-conversation, even mid-thought or mid-sentence? I kept trying to figure out the pattern/rules of when they use each language, but I never did figure it out. I feel like I was looking for and expecting hidden meaning because of this, but the writers evidently didn't intend to put any. Maybe I would benefit from a rewatch.

The Circle (2017): ★☆☆

I don't even remember how I initially found out about this movie, but I was intrigued by its awful reviews despite several big-name actors and interesting premise. Kinda like when I watched Cleopatra (1963), I was curious to see how it was messed up more than I actually was about the movie.

After watching it, I lack the expertise to criticize the technical issues of the film, but it never really makes any emotional impact. The movie gently scratches the surface of many different topics, but fails to meaningfully discuss any of them. There's no narrative through-line, so the scenes feel like disconnected vignettes. The ending (if you can call it that) feels unearned. It's like a scatterbrained rambletuber was asked to write two hours' worth of material about social media and then they tried to turn it into a movie.

The blu-ray was interesting in that it says "Canada only," but Amazon sent it to me in the United States anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The disc has absolutely no special features whatsoever, but it does automatically play three (skippable) trailers before loading the main menu. One was an army movie with Kate Mara and a dog, another was some other random army movie, and the last one was some slice of life movie about a group of teenage girls. Since I don't remember anything about them after watching all three trailers, they must have all been very successful movies /s. Normally trailers on discs annoy me, but this was mildly interesting as a time capsule.

Can anyone recommend any other infamous trainwreck movies that are nevertheless interesting to watch as case studies about what not to do?

Zootopia 2 (2025): ★★☆

This was about what I expected. If you enjoyed the first movie, then you'll probably enjoy this one. Like the original, it's heavy-handed with its theme at times to get the point across to kids. Parents can still enjoy most of the humor and character drama. The plot is weaker than the original, I was able to just go along for the ride and not worry about it too much.

There are so many callbacks or cameos to characters from the original that don't have any role in the sequel that it was distracting by the end. There are also several references to other movies, which doubtlessly means that there were many more that went over my head, but it was nice to see them when I did recognize them.

The Asphalt Jungle (1950): ★★☆

A noir heist film. It's also an early role for Marilyn Monroe, although the only has a scene and a half. This is definitely an old movie in style; it takes its time to show you the crooks planning the heist, assembling the team, actually doing it, making their getaway, and then bamboozling from the cops afterward. I feel like a modern movie would focus on carzy stunts during the heist and turn the escape into an action sequence. This movie patiently builds the tension establishing the characters (although would it have killed them to put them all together at least once? There are so many that it took me some effort to keep them straight at first) and maintains its relative calm during the hesit itself. That actually works pretty well and establishes the characters as professional criminals who have been there before.

I was surprised by how much they humanized the villains. I thought they couldn't portray the bad guys in a good light because of the Hays Code, but multiple guys here are shown with their wives and families and given at least some redeeming qualities. The ends of their character arcs are sometimes abrupt and unsatisfying because they don't tend to involve those elements after being introduced earlier in the movie.

My local theater isn't showing Kill Bill - The Whole Bloody Affair, but a theater from the same chain an hour away is. It would basically take up an entire afternoon to see it between driving, sitting through all the trailers, and then actually watching the movie. I've already seen the two parts separately and enjoyed both. Could someone here please try and convince me to go see it?