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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.
My wife and I watched The Invite last night. I liked it more than I thought I would, although I guess I shouldn't be too surprised considering the cast. Norton and Cruz were great but not surprisingly the movie is really carried by Seth and Olivia. Their banter, their hatred of each other, their snipes. It felt real and was also hilarious at times.
I knew the movie basically happened in one location and involved something to do with sex, but beyond that went in pretty blind. It's always impressive when a simple premise can be pulled off so well.
I think about the shot of Olivia crouched beside the oven and yelling about the souffle all the time. That movie is so much funnier than advertised.
Haha, so good. I also love how quickly she dumps it when they show up with flan. Yeah I guess you could say it's a dark comedy but it's legit funny. Hawk picking the worst time to show up with tea was hilarious too.
I went in practically blind too. Happy I did. I liked it more than expected because TBH I am not a huge Seth Rogen fan. I like him and I love that he’s a fellow Canadian but the guy mostly plays the exact same character in different settings. Still, this worked, felt like watching a play, and honestly I learned something from it that made me pause and think of my own relationship.
You Can See Everything
spoilers
I have been spinning all morning on what I think. It's an engrossing film and Nathan does a great job of raising questions for the viewer without giving a direct answer. I expected to leave the film with a clearer picture of Elizabeth Holmes but ended up with more questions, which is great.
I think a point of internal conflict for me was the Abbott and Costello scene. I've seen some views that her reaction in that scene was fabricated which reinforces the idea that everything she does is this rooted in manipulation. On the other hand, assuming it was real, you have the notion that Elizabeth has a difficult time grasping how a word could have multiple interpretations.
If scenario 2 is true then what exactly does that mean morally? She genuinely doesn't believe she lied at any point in the film, but she clearly did. I don't think the revelation absolves her of anything, but it would certainly "soften" my thoughts if the intent was rooted in a sincere attempt to communicate. And then I think "yeah but wouldn't that be an excellent ruse for a proven liar?" and I'm back to "master manipulator".
Excellent movie, curious to hear people's thoughts. Humans are complicated
sociopaths make for fascinating, frustrating character studies. Nathan was a perfect choice for this because he's not afraid to sit with cringe…he's empowered by it. Holmes's muppet-like stare and plastic smile are the yin to Billy's aggressive conman-techbro yang. examining this bizarre relationship is a treat, with Nathan's deadpan honest interview style bringing humor and levity to the absurdity. very glad i saw this at the theater for the gigantic close-ups, although it was exhausting playing facial-cue detective for nearly three hours.
if you've seen the trailer, that will give you a solid idea of what the first half covers. in true Nathan fashion, several hard pivots to the film's focus occur after Holmes reports to prison. IMO all of these pay off very well because they each feed into the through-line of narrative manipulation. you will not walk away from this having any greater or clearer understanding of who really knows what, to include yourself. you will definitely mutter "what in the fuuuuck" to yourself as the credits roll.
the cinematography is superb. it feels like this was filmed the same way newer fiction is framed/color-graded/lit to underscore just how unreal the entire narrative feels.
Sadly the film is not yet available where I live. My current thoughts regarding your scenario 2 is
the justice system is still fine as is on a practical level. Instead of purnishing her for doing something wrong (which would be something she genuinely could not understand), we'd be showing her that this is the consequence for the actions she took, which wrongful or not she should take into account in her future endeavors.
That said, intent is a major factor in deciding the appropriate level of purnishment. I think for cases like hers, there needs to be a category (if not already) for patterns of behavior that are judged as if they were done with intent. I think we care about whether a crime is intentional because 1. if it is, the person is less likely to have done so in other scenarios, so lesser purnishment is fair; and 2. we want to maximize mercy whenever possible.
If someone can be such a habitual liar to the point they're incapable of acting more truthfully, then (1) doesn't apply. (2) can give or take. Here the one getting mercy is likely incapable of appreciating it (as that requires that they appreacite the fact they did something wrong to begin with), such treatment is probably more for the benefits of other people.
I imagine it's like catching a loose tiger that has mauled a bunch of people. It's incapable of knowing right and wrong, still we need to balance between our desire to feel safe vs. to protect wild animals.
Saw The Social Reckoning a few days ago. Oof.
I feel like Aaron Sorkin is the Clayton Kershaw of movies. Outstanding career, undeniably one of the best of his era, but he'll give you a real stinker from time to time. And this movie was like 7 runs in 2.1 innings. For the non-sports people, The Social Network : The West Wing :: The Social Reckoning : The Newsroom. For the non-TV people, this movie was like a bad meal in a nice restaurant. It looks good, the atmosphere is nice, the service is fine, but then you take a bite and it's just....bleh. Not good. And I guess if we're going with the restaurant analogy, then Bill Burr was a surprisingly good and helpful busboy.
I was alone in the theater, and for the first time ever, I pulled out my phone to look something up because
I’ll tell you why that was present. Mikey Madison is one, ten years younger than the actual real life person was during these events. And they dressed Mikey really hot during a majority of their scenes together. It’s like there wasn’t any attempt to make her homely.
That was basically my exact complain to a friend after seeing the movie. He's a big movie guy and was saying that she wanted to transform after Anora. I don't know how much of that is true or what happened, but throughout the movie she just looks like Anora the data scientist with a Harvard MBA. Real She's All That energy.
I don’t think that’s her thing. I think that she’s trying to be a prestige actress, but lacks the intellect or taste to be able to choose high brow projects on her own. So she relies on dinosaurs in suits to make these decisions for her and they make outdated choices like being in a Sorkin movie.
The costuming was easily just Sorkin wanting her to look hot lol
The Social Reckoning
I'm like a Sorkin apologist. The Social Network and Moneyball are probably some of the best scripts from a Hollywood film in the 21st Century (Moneyball was co-written by Steven Zaillian which is an insane team up for a film).
I even really like Molly's Game and The Trial of the Chicago 7. Although I could admit that Trial would have been a better movie if Spielberg directed the film like he was supposed to back in 2008. Being the Ricardo's was the first time even I had to admit that it just was bad. The script was already not the strongest, but his directing was really bringing down everything. The blocking was horrendous, characters would just stand or sit for long scenes. David O Russell (American Hustle) was originally supposed to direct that and I imagine it would have been a better film with him at the helm.
This is a disaster. Like even if Molly's Game and Trial aren't the strongest films visually, they are still really good entertaining fun scripts. You can listen to the films as audio dramas and they are so good. That doesn't apply here. The script is horrible, there are no characters, there's no motivations. It's just speech after speech after speech of Sorkin's political beliefs. It feels completely detached from The Social Network despite this being a sequel. And it rings hollow because the events don’t really matter, they didn’t amount to anything.
Sorkin humanized Zuckerberg in the original and here he is a not person. He is a caricature of himself. It does not help that Jeremy Strong is playing Zuckerberg as if he were Rain Man. He's basically a robot. I understand Zuckerberg did not come across good during his congressional hearings, but he wasn't like this. Also, for as “method” as Strong advertises himself, his own mannerisms constantly bleed through his performance. So the method clearly ain’t working that well!
Mikey Madison's character is insufferable, annoying, whiny, and wildly inconsistent. Even if this is how the real person was, what, you couldn't soften her to make it easier to watch?
It's a big nothing-burger and somehow Sorkin has devolved in his technical capabilities, it is insanely poorly edited. We cut to inserts that are not important and are so awkwardly placed.
Madison should have just done Star Wars.
(1.5/5)
Other Mommy
This has received a critical lashing. It's one of the worst received films of the year. I don't understand why. It's competently made and Jessica Chastain is great in it. I thought the child actress was good for child acting standards. And there's a nice fairy tale quality to everything. I really have a hard time believing people walked away from this thinking it was a dumpster fire.
I will say though, it's just an R-Rated Coraline. I'm not sure if that's how the book is. But the movie takes the central concept from Coraline. The weakest part is Duplass in the father role, bad performance, and the character is just a pathetic cuckhold.
(3/5)
Heart of the Beast
This came out a few weeks ago and I was putting it off because anything to do with dogs has been hard for me to watch since I put my dog down. This was really good, but it is very much a tear jerker.
It's all very sincere, it's a really beautiful looking movie. I don't care for David Ayer as a director, I didn't like Fury. I thought that had a cheap quality to the way it looked. This has that same quality but it works in this films favor moreso than it did in Fury. It gives it like a B-Movie vibe. Brad Pitt is great in the role, the dog actor(s) is incredible. It was very old-school. And it's clearly inspired by White Fang and The Call of the Wild.
I was watching interviews with Ayer and I knew he was a white guy but I'm surprised he talks like a white guy. He grew up in East LA and has an affinity/obsession with Mexicans, so I thought he would talk like a Chicano. So that was a bit jarring for me.
(4.5/5)
Same! I thought I was the only one who enjoyed it. So I'm not crazy after all.
I liked that this movie
focused on the girl's internal journey in deciding who to trust and that's what ultimately saved her. Coraline was more oriented toward being an action adventure.
Last night I watched a Korean creature-feature called Hope. It was mildly entertaining for most of the movie, with the usual Korean quirkiness of including comic scenes in the middle of mayhem.
Then we got to the end, after nearly two and a half hours.
Click for hidden text
In the last ten minutes, I felt like I'd been yanked out of one movie, and shoved into another, with the same characters as before. As the credits rolled, I sat there asking myself, what the hell was that?Just finished The Disciple (2026) -- a documentary from Cilvaringz all about thast Once Upon a Time in Shaolin mess ~12 years ago. Not a bad documentary, but if you followed it back then, there isn't a lot of new material.
Whaaaat? Cilvaringz made a documentary? I suppose it had to happen, he's got a good understanding of how uniquely positioned he is (was?) and evidently tries to make the best of it. I'd say he doesn't deserve most of the hate he gets from the fandom.
I'm a serious Wu head, so from what you say I just may have seen/heard it all in real time when this was unfolding, but I'll still give it a go. Thanks!
honestly, I think RZA kind of fucked him over and caused all of this. Instead of simply having him release his own record that had pretty much everybody in the clan, bees, affiliates, etc... RZA was like 'oh nice, >yoink<'
But yeah, definitely watch it. We're likely in the same camp with our wu-fandom.
Watched this last week but cheating and putting it here. I watched a recently released Indian movie called "Modha Rathri" and I enjoyed it, it's a fun comedy drama movie that I'd rate a 8.5/10. The movie is about two strangers that're forced into an arranged marriage despite neither of them being ready for it. When each of their secrets and past come to light on their wedding night and in turn their first night (or "modha rathri"), a series of chaotic events unfolds.
The movie packs in an awful lot of comedy in its runtime and I can't think of even a 5-10 minute gap between jokes. There's just so much from the village eccentricities, the family dynamics, the situational humor, and general chaos that come together really well. Would definitely give it a watch!
Watched The Social Reckoning (2026) last night and man, what a terrible movie. It pales in comparison to The Social Network. The story is all over the place, the acting was a little weird to me, and overall it was just painful to watch.
I was gonna try and watch You Can See Everything but I saw that it’s three hours long, and I’d have to pay for a ticket to watch it since it’s not at the AMC here, and I already don’t care for Holmes. Though I liked Nathan For You and actually met Fielder when I was an extra for The Curse (he’s incredibly shy and awkward irl).
Sense and Sensibility
Before I go into the movie itself. Focus Features was probably thinking this was going to be their main awards contender before Obsession really blew everyone’s expectation and this ended up getting a lukewarm response.
I really love Emma Thompson’s version of Sense and Sensibility. I’m not a huge Austen fan (I find most of her protagonists annoying). But Thompson’s charming script and screen presence, mixed with Ang Lee’s direction and Hugh Grant made me fall in love with it.
Strangely, despite being the same story, with the same runtime, I found this one boring. None of the actors here carry the charisma of the original cast. I’d go as far to say that most of the people here are miscast, especially the men. George McKay has this villainous intensity to him that works well in stuff like The Beast but does not work at all here.
The cinematography is being praised, and while I think the movie is “pretty” overall and has a nice texture to everything, it looks drab and dreary because the colors are washed out.
The editing is bad. There’s moments where it attempts to have the unmotivated Malick-esque editing to varying degrees of success, but then suffers when there’s anything more complex than a simple shot-reverse shot.
It’s clearly inspired by Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice and Greta Gerwig’s Little Women. But it doesn’t have the technical sophistication that Wright brought or the personality and modernity that Gerwig brought.
There’s a warmness to this, I can see it being a comfort watch. I’ve heard Austen’s work be described as being pleasantly boring. So in that sense I can understand the appeal of this version.
(2.5/5)
Street Fighter
Whoever cut this teaser deserves an award because it made this movie look significantly better.
This reminded me of Suicide Squad. The editing is horrific. You can’t tell what’s going on. The teaser editors used better shots and understood timing more.
The story doesn’t make a lick of sense. The jokes don’t land. Despite the director being an Eric Andre alum and the director of Bad Trip, he doesn’t even properly cut the comedy and undermines his own jokes. And there’s a oh so random sense of humor to everything.
They should have gotten David Leitch to do this. But looks like the Talk to Me guys dodged a bullet.
(1.5/5)
You were an extra on an actual movie? When can we get your autograph please!
Joke aside, how was working on a movie set like?
It was a tv show. I’ve been an extra on a few things and they all differ. The Curse in particular was a long one where they had us check in at about 4AM and we didn’t leave until almost 8PM. I was still overweight at the time so I was uncomfortable lugging so much weight around outside of my home and I was having some serious allergies in my eyes. We spent a lot of hours in the holding room. And the shoots for each scene were the longest I ever did.
I did a network television show once and that was highly efficient. We were only there four or five hours and got like five scenes done.
I did two other movies as well. One was Ari Aster’s Eddington and that was fucking BRUTAL. We were playing teenagers at some dirt road party. Even though we were shooting in May it was freezing since it was a night shoot. There were high winds so dirt was getting in our eyes, crew members wore safety googles and masks but we couldn’t. And a lot of the crew members really did not like Ari and would make fun of him saying “this is written by someone who’s never been to a party before.” That was a 14 hour long shoot, from 5PM to 7AM.
The other was a movie called Trap House which was a pretty easy shoot and I got to meet Inde Navarette. Obviously, I didn’t know who she was at the time. My memory of her only came back when I saw an edit of her in the movie I did.
I love movies and I sometimes see people say what a magical experience it is to be on a movie set. But, for me, it just felt like I was in someone’s workplace.
Musk I haven't been able to catch it yet, but if anyone knows where I can stream it, please let me know. I've heard mixed reviews, but I've got a hobby project I plan to spend 4 hours doing, so I'd like to see it for myself.
I just wanted to mention that the Criterion Collection is having their biannual 24-hour half-off sale today. If you are interesting in getting any of their movies, you have about 21½ hours left, and their prices won't be this low again until March.