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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.
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.
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!