Midweek Movie Free Talk

Onslaught

This is clearly heavily inspired by exploitation films. It actually reminded me of the Grindhouse project that Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez did.

This is really boring though. It takes so long to get going, it feels like the first act is the first half of the film. The thing about exploitation films is that they had a lot of boring parts to pad the runtime. Tarantino even said this and stated he put boring scenes in Death Proof for that very reason. Death Proof gets going much faster and its “boring” scenes are still entertaining.

Also, you can be inspired by grindhouse films, but you can and should update them. It’s not like those films had multi million dollar budgets where they could afford the pyrotechnics that this films uses. So it didn’t have to be boring.

The Guest, which was Adam Wingard’s last attempt at a movie like this, was much better. This has really annoying editing choices and the score is whatever. I know The Guest was one of the first movies to bring back 80s inspired synth scores, but at this point it’s overdone and this film shouldn’t have had one.

Practical Magic 2

I saw the first Practical Magic two years ago. I didn’t grow up with it because I’m not a millennial white woman. When I first watched it, I realized I had mixed it up with The Craft. Because as it was going I was like “I thought this was supposed to be like dark and fucked up.” And then I watched The Craft right afterwards.

I didn’t like the first Practical Magic. I don’t really find it charming. It feels like a collection of three tv episodes that were stitched together. But it was kind of whatever for me at the time, I didn’t actively hate it.

This is about thirty minutes longer than the original and it feels so long. It’s such a slog. I thought an hour went by and when I checked my phone only 20 minutes had passed.

It’s not that funny. Bullock and Kidman try their best but it really is just not that funny. Maisie Williams is completely useless as a character, and she also has GOT-itis (as in most of the actors that came from that show are bad everywhere else). Joey King is fine. There’s some controversy behind her casting since she’s replacing Evan Rachel Wood. But Bullock was never gonna allow a nearly 40 year old woman play their daughter, who’s also hot.

Freakier Friday last year was much better written. It integrated the younger cast smoother. And it had the decency of being 90 minutes instead of almost 140 minutes.

Sandra Bullock hasn’t been in a movie since 2022 when she was in both The Lost City and Bullet Train. Bullet Train was mostly a voice over role where she replaced Lady Gaga at the last minute. So, I’d say she’s probably like semi retired at this point. And she’s mostly doing only things where she has control as producer.

Gravity is the last great film that she’ll ever do.

Hope

I think this is the first major Cannes release of the year.

Anyway, I heard that it was a straight forward action film. And that it was kind of weird that it was at Cannes and all that. It also got mixed reception at the festival. It reminded me of Jupiter's Moon which premiered at Cannes ten years ago and which was heavily criticized as a "Hollywood audition" from the director.

But all that seemed good to me, since I don't usually love these slow festival darlings like Drive My Car or EO.

I was really loving this. It looks incredible (minus the CGI which had budgetary constraints). It was tense, it has this really twisted sense of humor. Jung Ho-yeon is great, she has this action movie star entrance where she looks like a VS angel up on screen. The film is basically if Spielberg and Iñarritu had a baby. The action scenes were maybe repetitive, but I think you'd have a hard time not admitting that they're cool as fuck.

And then it ends in a very unfortunate way. I wish it didn't, but it took away from my enjoyment of the film.

I decided to watch the first three Spider-Man movies with Tobey. I found a nice 35mm open-matte rip, sync'd the subtitles, and we're off to the races. Can you see boom mics? Yes. Can you see the odd hand pop in off screen? Sure. Good scan. This shot (understandably) has the most -- https://i.imgur.com/1NecDhh.mp4