8
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.
The Bride
This was terrible. The trailer was growing on me, and I thought I might enjoy the obvious b-movie homage that this is... nope. I did not care for Gyllenhaal's directorial debut The Lost Daughter. It was terribly directed, the entire thing was shot on a close up. And that translates here, because she's clearly trying to have interesting visuals but I don't think her mind is able to work in that way. This is the same cinematographer as Joker 2, and it's very obviously going for the same vibe. But Todd Phillips actually knows how to make interesting visuals, as much as I didn't care for Joker 2 Phillips at least had that locked down.
Gyllenhaal is also a terrible director of actors, somehow despite being an actress herself (albeit a weak one). All the performances in The Lost Daughter are overwrought and that's the case here as well even with Bale. Buckley I don't think is a particularly good actress, but she has a strange and poorly written character and was clearly instructed to scream and shout. Colman I thought was the only one that came out of The Lost Daughter alright.
Tangent: Buckley got a semi-surprise nomination in Supporting Actress for The Lost Daughter, but I thought if anyone was deserving of that it would be Dakota Johnson. She's also a weak actress but that was probably the strongest performance of her career.
The Bride is so cringe inducing. There's a scene where Buckley is shouting METOO over and over. Just completely outdated, Gyllenhaal has terrible instincts, she's pretentious, self-important. I don't know why she was given almost 100 million dollars to make this movie, but I really hope she doesn't threaten us with another one.
That's such a bummer. I love Christian Bale and the idea of a Bonnie and Clyde retelling of the bride of Frankenstein is such a cool idea but all the reviews I've of this are saying it's just a mess.
to be fair, Kermode says it’s a hot mess but he watched it twice and enjoyed it both times.
It wouldn't surprise me if this finds its audience sooner rather than later and becomes a kind of cult classic. But it could've been more than that. The idea is so good!
I didn't know anything about it until his quick review. a good hot mess is kind of my jam... whether I like it or not. I tend to see great movies buried inside bad movies like this. Showgirls is a good example.
Ah that is a shame, I saw the trailers and was pretty hyped. I haven't seen any reviews, so this is a real letdown! I do like watching Buckley act, but it sounds like that might not be enough to carry it.
Just watched The Foreigner (2017). I'd call it a 7/10 honestly. It's got a pretty meh story, it was very easy to see where it was going at times, but the action was solid as you'd expect from a Jackie Chan movie. I'd probably watch it if you had easy access to it, but I probably wouldn't go out of my way to watch it haha.
The Secret Agent
This was the last Best Picture nominee I had to watch. I tried watching it five different times and I kept struggling to do it. It is so slooooow. I never really understood what the hell was happening. And it was so hard to pay attention to.
In a way it reminded me of Zero Dark Thirty, which I had the same issue with. Where I tried watching it four times over and over cause my attention would drift until I just went whatever and let it play.
Last year’s Brazilian awards film Im Still Here I thought was a tight and engaging thriller and this was just the complete opposite.
I was kind of mulling over the award season. And specifically two things.
The first was Chalamet, there were some anonymous ballots where one of the voters directly went “fuck that guy.” Because of his erratic behavior, saying he’s been putting great performances and that he deserved the Oscar. This and that. And also that his long term girlfriend is Kylie Jenner who nobody in the industry respects, but he was trying to sophisticate her by saying she gave him a strong foundation and yadda yadda. And now she’s trying to start acting and she’s been associating herself with more serious artist types like XCX (she was in The Moment). And it’s pretty interesting how much all of that affects voters.
Leo had an issue, he never went “I want an Oscar” despite it being obvious. But he was known as a player, he was known for dating a bunch of models. Not a “respectable” man. Which is why it took him until his 40s to win. He just had to wait it out for the industry to be like, okay he’s clearly one of the greats despite his personal life being the way it is. So a similar thing is gonna happen with Chalamet, I think his team is probably gonna beg him to get a different girlfriend and date a serious actress or musician or something.
The second one was Teyana Taylor. I think in that role and in that film that’s been steamrolling the awards season, it’s a role that should be sweeping the Supporting Actress category. But the issue is that Taylor is not perceived as a serious actress. She comes from the music world and reality TV and was heavily associated with Kanye. So I think if Keke Palmer, who is a similar age, but is seen as a more serious actress, was cast in the role instead she would have swept the category easily. It would make her the first Nickelodeon star to win, but also really like the first person that started in that children’s tv Nick/Disney world to win.
So those were just some thoughts I had about the whole ordeal.