Midweek Movie Free Talk

Over the past month I have watched all three Avatar movies.
I watched the first in theaters, in 3D, back when it was released.
Had not seen the other two until now, started by re-watching the first.

They are the most predictable pieces of drivel I think I have ever seen.
The visuals were new and interesting when the first came out, but even that got old after half an hour. Everything being bright and blue and pink and green isn't something to carry a franchise or should even be making money at this point.

James Cameron is a hack.
He reads TV Tropes like it's a playbook.
He peaked at Terminator 2 and hasn't done anything worth a damn since.
He shouldn't be allowed on a movie set again.

Just watched They Will Kill You with my mom. It was fun!

This is the kind of over-the-top violence I want: cartoonish levels of blood spray, crazy fight scenes, and just ignoring realism in favor of making it fun to watch. The story is fairly generic, but this is one of those cases where that's good because then they can just focus on just having a showcase of Zazie Beetz fighting off a whole building.

I watched Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and it was great in a Zoolander sense where its full of cameos and all that... just fun with some good gags.

Last night I watched Beverly Hills Ninja... which earned the entire 5.6/10. Not bad -- kind of perfect in its self-confidence.

I watched Miami Vice last night and thought it was kind of a mess. It's got the Michael Mann flair but the story was all over the place. I was reading after about some of the issues with Foxx during production but I think the script was probably just not very good.

I watched Backrooms recently. It was odd and unsettling, but ultimately it just didn't deliver a good payoff. The reveal near the end was hokey at best.

Been catching up on some 2025 releases.

Miroirs No. 3 is yet another another film on misaligned identity by Christian Petzold. This time with Paula Beer becoming sort of surrogate daughter for a woman in grief. Beer is always enchanting to look at on the screen and like in Afire the remote cozy house for a setting forms the contrast to the rather cold narrative. There is not a lot of mystery present, as it was pretty clear early sort of what was going on - though the exact circumstances and its details were revealed later. The interesting part comes from seeing the characters react and move through the inevitable shattering of their false pretense. Beer's character does remain mostly unreadable throughout the film, keeping some element of mystery and ambiguity going, when most of the rest of the film resolves itself.

Sirāt by Oliver Laxe was a bit of disappointment despite a good start with fifteen minutes of pumping rave music, bodies moving in sync in hypnotic dance and almost no dialogue. Then the movie turns into a psychedelic nightmare version of a Top Gear roadtrip special going from bad to worse. With some vague suggestion at a military conflict going on in the background. Intriguing mix of themes and genres at first, and I was waiting for some sort of idea to form for where this heading. Not that the film needed absolute clarity or a big "AHA"-moment. It lives quite well within its very limited outside knowledge setting, but when the film does reveal its hand it felt dishonest to me. I guess there is some symbolic attempt behind it all or a political allegory, but how it was framed here was mostly stupid, comically so, when it tries so hard to go for shock and despair. It falls flat pulling the rug under itself.

The Secret Agent by Kleber Mendonça Filho felt very much like a Brazilian take on No Country For Old Men and Coen-style narrative in general. The 70s look combined with the tension of a dictatorship rule really drew me in at first, and I was intrigued by the narrative that deliberately leaves you without full information for quite a while. But gradually I started to get a little annoyed by this style, as it seemed more and more like artificial suspense. The "putting pieces together" became less interesting as I mostly waited for the movie to reveal itself where it was already going, like one long tease of exposition. The film is frankly too long. I did like the turnaround for where it finally went, as it refuses to give proper closure with an almost off-screen ending to what we think is the main narrative - again not unlike No Country For Old Men. It is a bold move and it did work in the movie's favor, as it ended up being more how history shapes people and society for decades, rather than the spectacular events from a short period in time.

Evil Dead Burn

I did not watch Evil Dead Rise, but I have seen all the other Evil Dead films. This felt more like a generic horror script that only re-wrote the set pieces to be more Evil Dead-like.

The opening was bad, and it then takes like 40 minutes for the movie that actually kick in. But all that material, that’s supposed to make us care about the characters, is so poorly written and acted for the most part. It felt like I was watching Rings (2017), if anyone remember that.

It’s also an ugly looking movie. I’ve seen some people say it’s closer in spirit to the 2013 film, but that is an insult to Fede Alvarez’s craft. The 2013 script also had a much better script and actors.

The Invite

There was a while where I tried watching 2019’s Booksmart but I couldn’t get through the first couple of minutes. And I think it’s because by the time I started trying to watch it my tolerance for that quirky 2010s style of humor completely dissipated. The time to watch it for me was when it came out but I didn’t, for whatever reason. I know it was super praised at the time but has since been re-evaluated negatively.

Don’t Worry Darling was a disaster, not just with all the behind the scenes drama that occurred, but just what we see on screen. I read the original screenplay for that and it was a tight, fun, and entertaining social thriller that would have lasted 90 minutes at most. Wilde decided to take that script and make it slow, meandering, and boring by tacking on an additional 40 minutes on bullshit. And I think she did that because the original script was written by men (Dick Van Dyke’s grandsons to be exact) and wanted a more feminine slant to it all. But that was a mistake overall.

This is so good. People were already praising it, but it really is such a step up for Wilde. It reminded me of 2024’s His Three Daughters. It takes place in one location. It’s an examination of relationships. It’s really funny and high energy. There’s some really awkward physical comedy. Really blew me away by how cinematic the film was.