Midweek Movie Free Talk

I watched A Better Tomorrow (英雄本色) (1986) tonight. I watched an english dub with subs and... well, the subs are significantly better -- almost to the point where its a different movie.

Aesthetically, there are some really amazing frames and one really amazing gush of blood that may be the greatest in the history of cinema.

Thursday or this weekend will have me in the sequel, A Better Tomorrow II (英雄本色2) (1987), but I won't watch the 'third', since its a shitty prequel.

edit: I might watch True Romance: The Tarantino Cut, a fan-fix that aligns with QT's original script. It can be seen here

I watched Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It’s been on my list for a long time as I enjoy Tarantino films. Not sure why it took me so long to watch it. I liked it! I didn’t really get the point of Margot Robbie’s character tho. Maybe a reference to something that flew over my head? Maybe just part of the setting and the mood of the story? Anyway, yeah, liked the movie! I’d say I preferred it to a few other of Tarantino’s titles. I no longer enjoy too much violence on the screen so while a younger me would say something like Kill Bill is amazing, the older me preferred the pace of this movie. Still has SOME violence and I’m glad it did as it may not feel like a true Tarantino film otherwise!

The Strangers: Chapter Three

I just put Chapter Two on my underrated post. I stand by it, this got worse reviews and I still liked it. Chapter Two is the best film of the trilogy, but these last two installments are so wonderfully weird to me. They take that initial idea for The Strangers, which is not a movie I care for, and they go in such a bonkers way with it. Chapter Two was a non-stop chase film and this is much more solemn and atmospheric. I think there’s a lot of really good looking shots in this. I love the sound design of both this and chapter two, it’s so visceral.

Madeleine Petsch is so incredible in these films. It showcases her range. It makes me wish that she eventually gets her Charles Melton moment (Melton was a cast member on Riverdale which is where Petsch got her start). Both her and Melton are clearly the strongest actors of that CW show. I would love it if she got more serious work.

(3/5)

The Moment

I’m a recent convert to Charli XCX. I of course listened to Fancy back in 2014 as everyone who was conscious did. And the only other two songs anyone knew her from in the 2010s Boom Clap and I Love It were also frequently played on my phone. Never thought about XCX again before brat really. I was aware she released an album before but only listened to it post-brat.

If you’re not a fan of brat or the aesthetic XCX used for her music videos, you won’t like this. This is an extension of all that.

It takes most of its inspiration from I’m Still Here which was an experimental project directed by Casey Affleck in which he used Joaquin Phoenix to pull off real life stunts in order to deconstruct celebrity. That’s a movie I really liked when I was a teenager despite its polarizing reception. And it’s directly referenced in this film. This does a similar thing where XCX is using this as almost a journal entry to discuss how she feels about her sudden skyrocketing of fame.

It’s also very clearly a critique on Taylor Swift and her Eras Tour. Much was made about the ending being a direct satirization of it, but the whole film is basically one big poke at Swift and her overly curated, sterile, safe, image. Which is basically the antithesis of what XCX is, and really what is not deemed to be artistically worthwhile.

I will say the weakest part of the film was XCX’s performance. The film works better when she’s less of a direct focus. Her bombing the Narnia audition for the White Witch completely makes sense now. Skaarsgard is the stand out.

There’s a part of me, because I know she’s extremely online, that it would be funny if she was somehow somewhere lurking on this forum. This isn’t really her speed though.

(3.5/5)

Does anybody want to talk about:

Sinners (2025): ★⯪☆

Quick reminder that my scores are based on how much I enjoyed watching it rather than an objective measure of quality. So even though I gave this the same score as another movie, I'm not saying that it's necessarily just as bad of a movie. But that said...

I don't get the hype. The movie was fine, but not as amazing as advertised. It apparently didn't leave much of an impression on me, since I can't remember any details besides the basics of the plot after just a few days. It's another movie where the protagonists are unsympathetic (at least at the beginning), and I think I mixed up Smoke and Stack for a while, so it's another movie that made me feel dumb. And as the horror picks up, it has a couple points where the characters do the horror-movie staple of making the worst choices imaginable. So this movie has all common threads of things I tend not to like in movies, and probably just isn't for me.

So along with One Battle After Another, I'm 0 for 2 on enjoying the Best Picture frontrunners this year, and I'm feeling a little discouraged. I feel like I can't really say anything without people assuming I'm a bad-faith internet contrarian and inviting the wrong kinds of rebuttals from the wrong sorts of people, but that means that I can't really join the biggest conversations about the most popular recent movies.

Wings (1927): ★★☆

(Please excuse the rambling; this movie left me with more questions than coherent thoughts...)

Is this really considered a silent film? It seems like something in-between a "silent" film and a talky. There isn't audio dialogue, but there is synchronized sound (in addition to the score) for gunshots, whirring of plane engines, explosions during the war sequences, etc. I knew that silent films had musical scores, but this is more than that.

This movie gave me more appreciation of older film techniques. The title cards often have artistic or stylized backgrounds instead of plain text, and the frames are tinted either yellow or blue to indicate time of day or a change of location. It also has clearly-added-later orange coloring to fire and gunshots. Neither technique is needed in modern color films, so it's interesting to see how they're used here. I'm also surprised by how much objectionable material they got away with by the standards of the day. This movie has brief nudity, a scene set in a burlesque (?) club, and someone being shot in the chest and coughing up blood, among other things. I get that it was pre-code, but it's still something that I subconsciously just don't expect from a movie this old.

I was surprised by how many jump cuts this movie has. One jump cut is jarring and breaks continuity, but this movie does it so much (like seriously, at least a dozen times, sometimes one after the other) that it feels like it might have been an intentional artistic decision somehow.

This movie is less than 2½ hours long, but it has an intermission? I know it used to be more common for long movies to have intermissions, but was it common way back in the day to have an intermission for a more normal-length movie? I see that there are two cuts of the movie, and I saw the longer one. Does anyone know which 33 minutes of material was removed from the shorter cut? And which cut was voted Best Picture in 1929?

Mercy (2026): ★★☆

Like Minority Report, but not as good. My expectations were low and I went on discount Tuesday, but I probably would have dropped a star if I had paid full price. The movie is similar to The Circle (2017) in that it brings up a lot of issues with modern technology, but it fails to follow through on any of them, even the AI it focuses on.

There's a good idea in the premise, but this movie never emphasizes it. In America, you have the right to decline to answer questions in a criminal investigation against you. But what if a computer unilaterally decides that you're guilty based on the evidence available to it. What if the only way to clear your name is to waive your constitutional rights and testify in your own defense? The movie put the thought in my head, even though it never explores this particular concept.