Contentious C
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Posts posted by Contentious C
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45 minutes ago, Cobra Commander said:
there was a version with even more sex, but I don't think it was out when voting was going on, so any Oscar voters with ballgag fetishes might have voted even more strenuously for Poor Things
FIFY. Their problem with the ballgag in Pulp Fiction likely wasn't the ballgag, it was who was wearing it.
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I'm more fond of Friedkin's "I don't give a flying fuck into a rolling donut" about Al Pacino's opinion of him.
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Someone my mother knew would constantly say "needless to say" during conversations. It was basically a game within the house when she came over: someone find a newspaper, grab a pencil, and start blindly making marks to count. I think the record was something like 17.
Also, if it's "needless to say", why the fuck you sayin' it, idiot?? Ugh. Hated her.
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Why does the other Christian McCaffrey in the Wingstop commercial sound like he's from Canada when the commercial cutaway says Illinois??
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Dallas in the midst of potentially barfing up a double-digit lead on Miami at home, and they haven't looked like they can really take it to the better teams. Gotta say, not a good look when your best player is having an all-time great season and you're still just the 8 seed. SGA would get my MVP vote right now, gaudy stats or no.
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Miami teams keep paying guys what their stat lines are going to be. Not smart!
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And Ben Simmons is done for the year, hopefully for good just so we can quit hearing stories about what a bust he's been.
And the Wizards are now on a 16-game losing streak. If they can push it to 18, we'll have had 3 18+ game losing streaks in the same season. That's got to be a record, certainly in the 3-point era.
EDIT: And of course they beat the hapless Hornets the next time out. Fie!
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Just got back from sticking m--nah, just kidding, I don't eat popcorn in the first place. Spoilers ahoy.
SpoilerI think what I was struck most by - aside from the sound editing & mixing that are just as assaulting as the first film and are therefore almost literally striking you - is that it's the anti-Gigli, a movie so bad the only thing that saved it was 3 minutes of Christopher Walken. Here, Walken might be close to the only weak link in the Blockbuster to End All Blockbusters.
But BOY do they elide or toss out a LOT of the weird from the book. Baby plots (both of them)? Mostly gone or pushed into the future. All of the Baron's internal weirdness being expressed? Gone. The notion of Paul as being the end goal instead of merely one stir stick in the Bene Gesserit pot? Gone. The Fenrings as a colossally weird pair of manipulators? Just one manipulator doing that manipulating with her vag. Chani as someone still shown respect as a love interest? Nah, let's have her get all emo about stuff instead of understanding that Paul is pulling strings that he has to pull.
Some of the changes I get, but some of them just flatten out the profile of a story that was weird and icky and nutso in some good ways (also some bad, but more good ways than bad). Hard to tell what they could do with Messiah, assuming they choose to make it in 5-10 years time, but it might necessitate some big changes considering what they did here.
But, the scope is ridiculous, the acting is good, the action scenes are mostly excellent (though Zendaya is NOT a hand-to-hand fighter), and Austin Butler kind of steals the show in spite of the kookiness of his make-up. I don't think it's as breath-takingly great as some do, but, yeah, it's way up there anyway. Still like Arrival and Incendies better out of Denis' movies, though.
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Yeah, because what would cinema be without that Uma Thurman scene?
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The only reason to have any at this stage is just to tell people you have a dormant account, so they don't think you're a drug dealer or something.
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On 2/27/2024 at 11:54 AM, Mister TV said:
They're using the name for resorts/hotels and a cheap clothing line at JC Penney.
Two perpetual death spirals that taste great together?
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2 hours ago, Curt McGirt said:
Are they giving away the sandworm tops to all that size popcorns or is it just something special for certain places? Or do you have to pay an extra $20?
Free for any single males in the audience.
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1 hour ago, RIPPA said:
Jalen Brunson appears to have blown out his knee so the Knicks are fucked
No news yet, but some of the footage, when replayed by a few sports med types, suggested it was more of a knee-to-knee contact that caused a nerve issue. His limping looks bad but may be typical for the contact he took? Pretty interesting video here.
Hope he's OK. One of the better stories in the league the last couple of years, and even as an Atlantic rival, it's hard not to root for him.
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My favorite bit is that we broke another Steph "consecutive games with a 3" streak.
On the other end of the spectrum, the Clippers & Wolves played a Late 90s game where neither Conley nor Harden made a bucket from the field for the entire game (62 minutes of floor time combined).
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Dallas & Golden State have been playing as well as anyone in the Western Conference since the All-Star break, maybe them and Denver.
Boston boatraced Dallas despite a Luka TD the other night, and they are absolutely walloping GS in the first half so far. I really don't see who's going to beat them, except A) themselves, or B) bad luck with injuries. Tillman probably isn't going to play heavy minutes, but he looks like he fits right in. Time to lock up that home court...
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10 hours ago, RazorbladeKiss87 said:
Oh, but I will say that I liked Mia Goth in Nymphomaniac.
It's a good thing I'm not in charge of member titles, or you'd be, "The Guy Who Liked Something, Anything about Nymphomaniac". I looked up her part but I couldn't for the life of me tell you who she was in that.
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Meh.
It went fine, but...I don't know. She married her college boyfriend, got divorced 2 years ago, and has only been dating again for a bit over a year, and I very much get the impression she is figuring out who she is on her own. These are, uh, to put it mildly, things I don't need time to figure out. Nor do I need to be "the poor schmuck who happens to be around and gets the emotional short shrift while you figure them out." I'm also getting demisexual sorts of vibes, did even on the first date so...probably wouldn't work anyway. She said she wanted to go out again, but I think I'd rather just not bother if it's going to feel like there's no spark coming from her. It might be simpler to just pose a few telling questions if/when she texts me again and see if I'm right, give myself the reason to hit the eject button now before getting involved.
It's too bad; the rest of it would have worked out nice if it were really about the nuts-and-bolts of "can you coexist?". But I get a significantly stronger "she has the hots for me" feeling off a select few of my married/committed friends than I do this lady, and that's not what you want out of your own prospects.
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Going on a second date with a hot girl I like this afternoon; this is when I kiss her, right?
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Criterion has had that going for a while. Same with TCM.
Anyway, yeah.
The Time Machine (2002) - I'd always heard this was catastrophically bad, and that part of the reason Guy Pearce did an enormous shitload of DTV crap afterwards is because this tanked his career. It's just...averagely bad? There are worse movies than this by a mile. It certainly isn't good, though, since the entire back half of the film is portrayed by generally bad actors, lots of details are never explained in any meaningful way, and then it gets wrapped up too neatly (who knew every tweedy scientist was capable of a muscle-up, right?). The nicest thing I can say about it is now I've seen it, and it showed me how weaksauce and derivative one particular time-travel idea I had for a story would have been.
When Will I Be Loved - Now HEEEERE is the bad stuff. Ugh. If this is any indication, it's probably for the best that James Toback's career has been summarily shot into space post-#MeToo.
I first heard about this in the local paper when it came out; let's face it, it's not famous because it's any good (it isn't). It's famous because this slice of chaos was, inexplicably, Neve Campbell's first nude scene in a film, and back in '04, that was still reason enough to get eyeballs on a movie that otherwise didn't deserve them. Sure, Toback had an Academy Award nomination to his name and a few other credits where people took notice for one reason or another, but there's essentially nothing about this to save it from its current placement in Bad Movie Hell.
It's so shoddily assembled that the edits and sounds border on painful. It feels like something trying to both bask in and also skewer its influences; if it's trying to be a bit like a Woody Allen movie, down to name-dropping him, this is more, "Woody Allen Ain't Got Nothing on What a Creep I Am." If the meandering park scenes and random encounters were meant to evoke, I don't know, Cleo from 5 to 7, this spin on the idea would be more akin to Horny Dingbats from 5 to 7. Calling the ancillary characters thin gruel is an insult to gruel; Mike Tyson as a gossamer-veiled version of himself might be the only member of the supporting cast to sound half as amusing as he's meant to be. And the almost improvisational style of dialogue is laughable at best. In fact, for a wide swath in the beginning, the dialogue is so pathetic and garbled that it seems 100% pulled out of one orifice or another. It reads like Toback told the cast he wanted to do a Mike Leigh sort of film and then only shot a single take, failing to understand the iteration towards competence and emotional authenticity that goes into Leigh's films.
If there's anything that keeps this off the cinder pile of the Truly Worst of All-Time, it's that Campbell and Dominic Chianese are professional enough to make their scenes together work. Their longish section could have had something compelling to say about money, power, aging, sex work, honesty: all sorts of topics, if only it hadn't been trying so hard to fit them all into ten minutes of mostly cruel banter. Their dialogue still feels stilted, self-indulgent, and basted far too long in its own juicy pretension, but they take that chicken shit and turn it into...well...certainly not into chicken salad, but also not-chicken shit.
In the end, it's hard not to think of the contemporaneous and Internet-famous argument that transpired between Vincent Gallo and Roger Ebert due to a screening of Gallo's movie, The Brown Bunny. Ebert's GOAT zinger to Gallo would ring true here, as well. No matter who you are, no matter what you did in life, be thankful: you're not James Toback and you didn't direct When Will I Be Loved. Moreover, it's this writer's fervent hope that, if you did direct any films, you weren't such a sad sack that you thought you could hide your creepy, disgusting insecurities in plain sight, as Toback clearly attempts in this sad little punch bowl stowaway.
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning - Since they claim they're changing the title on the next one, I feel no need to call it "part one" like a lame-o. I really would like Pom Klementieff to just play World's Sexiest Chaos Gremlin in everything; this tops her turn as Mantis largely due to the sexiness factor. But man oh man, it's so weird that they keep casting women opposite Tom Cruise who might be Too Hot for Tom Cruise...and yet the one time they cast someone *as his wife*, it's arguably the least attractive leading lady in the entire series. Anyway.
How's the movie? Welp? Have you seen the last 3? Then you've seen this. Plug in Esai Morales doing...uh, the FUCKING WEIRDEST VOICE EVER (seriously, when did he come up with the oddly deep hypno-drone? He didn't used to sound like that, did he have some kind of freak accident?), Venice and Rome instead of Other Famous Cities, and some different batshit stunts. You've seen this already, it's preposterous, it's mildly enjoyable, it's Mission: Impossible. The whole AI plot is kind of fucking annoying, though, since, at the end of the day, it's completely unclear how its objectives are being met, especially when those objectives are so clearly affecting real-world things (like blowing up bridges with time bombs, apparently it's totally normal to have dudes hanging off this bridge that's part of a famous rail line, embedding shit into the mortar, no one in Austria looks twice at that...).
X - Why, exactly, did people make a big deal about Mia Goth? You aren't bedazzled by her talent. You aren't bedazzled by her looks. It's her GODDAMN LACK OF EYEBROWS, OK? That's what's tweaking your brain, not this pornified-Texas-Chainsaw-Massacre, subverting-tropes-but-not-really, bunch of ageist bollocks masquerading as mid-concept horror. I was thinking I was going to watch this and Pearl, but this was too friggin' boring to make Pearl worth the time.
Urban Cowboy - Speaking of people who didn't need a big deal made about them, John Travolta dancing again, everyone! At least this isn't as blatantly fucking offensive as practically every second of Saturday Night Fever, although this skips over the frequent calls of "See You Next Tuesday" and goes straight into domestic violence as a no-chaser shot. On the plus side, Travolta's portrayal is pretty solid, as it's clear he's a lot more in on the joke with Bud than he was with Tony, making him into a right proper lunkhead in almost every scene before it inevitably draws itself to its absurdly saccharine close. This movie feels like the film version of License to Ill: there's probably a lot of tongue-in-cheek fun being had at the expense of the culture it presents, but it probably did more to typify and celebrate it than anything else. Oh, and this is far and away the Least Craggy I've ever seen Scott Glenn look, but, then again, I still haven't watched Nashville.
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1 hour ago, dogwelder said:
None of which are a surprise. Leno and Gates were bad and Logan Thomas was getting too concussed to bag groceries.
FIFY.
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5 hours ago, JLSigman said:Spoiler
Yes, there's a credit wayyyyyyyyyyyy down the IMDb list, but how they're handling that is...weird? Will probably warrant actually seeing the movie to understand the direction they're going with it.
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Hell, I watched the end of the Rebirth cutscene after...you know, THAT...and it was a bunch of befuddling nonsense. My guess is it will only get more needlessly confusing once everything is finished. I'm glad I was only marginally nostalgic about the original in the first place and won't feel compelled to waste hundreds of dollars on their overblown do-over.
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Forget games on TNT, Shaq messing with Chuck about social media (S: "Just add #onlyfans!" Chuck: "Is that for only fans of mine?") is the real highlight tonight.
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Jerry Jones is evidently caught up in a paternity suit with a 27-year-old.
Thankfully for those of us not in possession of copious amounts of brain bleach, the suit alleges he is the 27-year-old's father, not the father of her child.
2024 MOVIES DISCUSSION THREAD
in MOVIES & TV
Posted · Edited by Contentious C
I watched stuff. Who knows what precious opinions will be shared next!
Pearl - OK, fine, I watched it after all; my Paramount subscription was about to expire. Turns out I should have picked something else, because this was on Kanopy or some nonsense instead. Ah well; next time, American Gigolo. But yeah, every bit as boring as X, maybe worse. I think we understood after the first 14 times she was at loggerheads with her mom that bad things were going to happen eventually! We get it! Quit padding your movie with dumb bullshit just to hit a longer runtime! The monologue was fine, but...otherwise, waste of time. But, I suppose they got 2 films out of one film budget, so Kid Cudi made his money back, or something? And the guy they cast as the new Superman does look an awful lot like a de-aged, taller Henry Cavill, so probably a good call there, too.
A Place in the Sun - Now here we go. I think I grew up with so much of the "Liz Taylor in the tabloids" nonsense of the 80s that it's difficult for me to appreciate who she was. Then, I watched Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? about 15 years ago, and that naturally blew me out of the water and up to somewhere best labeled 'ionosphere'. This, on the other hand, was probably the first time I'd seen "Elizabeth Taylor, Dazzling Superstar" and OK, you got me, she might very well have been one of the prettiest women to ever grace the screen. And putting her opposite Montgomery Clift - it's no wonder those two were so close while he was alive, because you can tell right away they have that *something* that makes a movie like this work.
Of course, everything else about the story is...some of the most ass-backwards, insane, what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-people kind of stuff that naturally looks that way now because so much has changed in 70 years. I read Sister Carrie in college and have thought ever since that Dreiser was a judgmental fuckface on his best day, and this plot doesn't really make me change my mind, but you do have to start wondering how different the world would be if the pill had been invented 20 or 30 years earlier. The most awful thing this movie does, really, is turn Shelley Winters into a pestering, nagging, horrible shrew (a role she'd end up revisiting about once every 11 years) just because she expects someone, anyone, to do the right thing in a society full of people who literally cannot, will not say OUT LOUD what the right thing is. Maybe that's what Dreiser was trying to say all along: the real American tragedy is our pathetic need to cling to puritanical bullshit despite its place as a see-through fig leaf, instead of speaking plainly and facing difficult truths. I don't know. Movie's pretty good, though, especially the acting.
Breakfast at Tiffany's - Yeah, it was Classics week around here, kinda, crossing things off the ol' Letterboxd watchlist. Man, I wish I could say, "the past was really fucked up!" but hey, we're still fucked up, and YOU are fucked up if you think going back to times like this would make us better! Actually, who the Hell am I kidding? This movie is about sugar babies, for Christ's sake: it's as 2020s as a film could be! I should have watched Shiva Baby as a double feature with this. Funny how much more stuff got binned for this, since Peppard's character is gay in the novella and Lula loses a baby (who evidently never exists here). But hey, why not talk about a 13-year-old marrying an OLD MAN like that's normal and put Mickey Rooney in yellowface? Sure! That's cool! Go for it! Ugh.
But this is another stellar case where it's best to ignore the time-specific details and focus more on the tone and the acting. There's plenty of Capote's dialogue to pick it up, and the scene where Lula finds out about Fred is Audrey Hepburn on full display; you could call it overdone, but to me, it worked better than any other moment she had in the film. Evidently, she found the role difficult since she was far more introverted than Holly, but I think the introvert is on display in that dark room. Plus, the ending and Peppard's speech are all-timers that get at the heart of why people are still so screwed-up. Yeah, more great acting, ignore the racism and grossness.
Tiptoes - After talking about Freeway a while ago, I had to indulge my morbid curiosity and sit through this. And I gotta say, weird.
OK, some of the disdain directed its way is deserving; when Peter Dinklage is *right there* in your cast, you really don't need Gary Oldman front-and-center (especially when McConaughey had already been in enough rom-coms to this point to be a star, and so casting Oldman as a top-billed guy wasn't entirely necessary). But...people seem hell-bent on criticizing this as somehow particularly insensitive to its subject matter, when, aside from a few lines, it's really not that at all. Say, does anyone remember all the times we talked about Nerd Blackface?
Oh, I'm sorry: I forgot, most of the nation seemed totes-McGotes fine with The Big Bang Theory motherfucking CONSTANTLY engaging in broad, offensive stereotypes, because those could be anyone, right? Give it 13 years on TV and a bunch of annoying spin-offs, right? Please. 90 minutes of this movie does more to engage and get people to think about its characters than that show ever did. But sure, let's pretend this is cinematic arsenic.
Is this a good movie? Well, no. It's not even close. It isn't funny, it isn't dramatic, it's more than a bit all over the place, and the ending is equal parts telegraphed and befuddling (maybe that's the 'theatrical cut' nature of it that Matthew Bright complained about, maybe not). I'm sure Chad Everett and Brian J. Anderson shared a moment together during their scenes to commiserate about how far they were from Mullholland Dr. after only two years. But this probably isn't as utterly terrible, nor as crassly offensive, as it's been portrayed for the last 20 years, either.
Not as bad as The Crow: Wicked Prayer, is what I'm saying.
Bottoms - Hey, let's take every over-the-top moment from Booksmart and turn it up to...not quite 69, because not everyone gets some in this movie? But close? Gotta say, though, I don't think I've seen a comedy that was quite this willing to be as committed to a bit, no matter how too-far-gone or how cringe-worthy certain parts of that could end up being, and I think that's to its credit. You can't really do Yet Another Teen Comedy, But Make It Raunchy and have that fly unless you actually distinguish yourself, and the sheer absurdity of the jokes they run out there is Olympian in stature, if not always in quality. It doesn't hurt that I love Ayo Edebiri, either. Rachel Sennett's pretty great, too. But the real scene-stealer is the kid who resembles Justice Smith, but manages to out-act Justice Smith inside of his first 30 seconds of screen time, leading me to wonder, why the FUCK does anyone cast Justice Smith in anything?
I already talked about Dune, go read that, too, I guess.