Contentious C
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Posts posted by Contentious C
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Finally got around to watching the last of the new Planet of the Apes movies. A pretty clear drop-off in quality as that series went further along. All kinds of glaring plot holes in the last one, though I liked the Christopher Columbus-style bit of irony toward the end. Mostly I just wondered why we needed to have a billion-dollar movie franchise that lets us fake-empathize with fake apes when we could have spent a billion dollars actually empathizing with them by, I don't know, not destroying their habitats and not hunting them into extinction. We really are the worst.
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Fun tidbit about the casting in Invincible --
SpoilerLiterally every member of the Guardians of the Globe is a cast member of THE WALKING DEAD. Because they're all--ah, you get the joke.
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Yeah, I bet he got a lot of mail when his kidney problems began: "Hi Bernie, I'd like to offer you a transplant; it's got guaranteed 8% better function..."
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If I'd known it was this easy to get a custom title, I would have slandered him at any point in the last 3+ years.
The picture I could do without, though...and now my C is green instead of blue. *sigh*
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Apparently, Joe West thought this sort of thing would keep him from getting in the Hall of Fame.
Don't worry, Joe. Being a shitty, shitty, shitty umpire will do that all by itself.
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I guess Twitter has more influence on me than I would like; there was some bullshit going around about how many of the Best Actor winners from the 2010s really deserved it (maybe 2?) and I found myself rewatching Manchester by the Sea to see if it clicked any better a second time. I mean, fuck Casey Affleck, and he's not one of the two deserving winners - he feels like he's playing 2 disparate roles for most of the film and it's rare that the two bleed together in any meaningful way - but the rest of the movie is better than I remembered. It's still kind of bullshit for having kids dying to advance a character's arc, but mostly, the script just felt a lot funnier than it did the first time. Of course, it also has Michelle Williams, and her One Big Scene in the movie got me right in the feels even harder than it did the first time, and that reminded me how ludicrous it is that she doesn't have an Oscar yet. I put off rewatching it for the 2010s project, and I still probably wouldn't have put it on my list, but Kenneth Lonergan did a pretty nice job with it. Also reminds me I haven't seen Margaret yet, which I ought to fix.
I tried watching The Abyss as well, since I remembered that fairly strongly from my childhood and thought it'd be a good idea to revisit it. Wow is it some stinky-bad bullshit. I had to turn it off after the first 45 minutes because it was so close to putting me to sleep. I'll probably finish it at some point, but it's clearly the baby steps of James Cameron's deep-water fetish that he took to completion all over America's face and neck with Titanic. The whole movie makes you think he'd be That Guy at a party who comes up to you and says, "Did you know we know more about outer space than we do our own ocean floor?" Fuck off, Cameron, you douchy nerd. Just fuck right off with that, and jerk yourself off with a warm towel at home, instead of in public.
I also tried watching Warlock, another Amazon Prime freebie that I hadn't seen since I was young and kind of remembered liking, and wow, had to turn off that total garbage, too. Just a gruel-thin, blatantly obvious attempt to re-do The Terminator by swapping out sci-fi bullshit for witchy bullshit. No. Thank You. Sir. God, the 80s could really be shit for movies.
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Start your day with a hot BM!
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I'd say the simplest one is to mention jury nullification, and the lawyers will toss you. I go with the old raised hand when they ask the question, "Has your life been touched by crime?" I mean, at the point where you're old enough to be on a jury, whose life hasn't been?
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I think the way to stick it to these companies who think this kind of connectivity is a good idea would be to craft a little image or piece of code that lets your fridge think all it has inside are a collection of butt cheeks. Just wall-to-wall butts. Nothing but severed butts. Not even matched pairs or anything. Just butts.
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Continued onward with some more of Joe Hill's stuff, and BOY, was The Fireman the wrong book to start reading in the last 12 calendar months!
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I can tell I'm getting old when I look forward to halftime because I can do some dishes.
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I liked the style of that anthem, if not the execution all the way through.
Also, why do they put Raftery on the air? To make Tourette's sufferers feel better about themselves?
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If you could Thanos-snap all of professional wrestling out of existence for all of history, the world would probably be a better place. At the least, it wouldn't be missing anything, and maybe the McMahons would be washing cars or working as short order cooks or something.
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What. The. SHIT.
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College basketball hasn't been really watchable for a long time, but this has been a wonderful game. Love to see it under these circumstances.
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So I got around to watching Nomadland, since I absolutely loved The Rider and I was interested to see what Chloe Zhao had up next.
Turns out it was a lot of the same.
That's not a bad thing per se; I just didn't expect it to chase so many of the same ideas so much. I don't like comparing films to just say "X is better than Y" except when it's your standard comic-book cheeseburger fare, but this just freely opens the door to those comparisons because the films are so much alike. And this had a lot of potential that I'm not sure I felt was followed through upon. Where The Rider is your fairly direct coming-of-age story, Nomadland is about the end of life and trying to do something with your time. It's something I've been thinking more and more about covering in my writing, and this...well, it begins to shape out some really interesting things, but I think it spends too much time with little slice-of-life details that don't necessarily add to the larger picture. The characters in The Rider weren't just friends or family or co-workers; they were nearly all of them foils for the main character, and you can see the gears turning in his head about the choices he has to make. I'm not sure that's quite so well articulated here, even with Frances McDormand doing the bulk of the articulating. Or maybe she just comes off as more stubborn at times, to the detriment of the story that's being told.
I don't know. I could see this winning Best Picture anyway, but if you haven't seen either of her movies, I'd watch this first, then go back to The Rider.
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Well, keep in mind that sometimes when there's a light at the end of the tunnel, it's an oncoming train.
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I'm glad Killing Eve is going to end soon-ish; the third season was OK but it's definitely run its course and then some by now.
While I have Hulu, I started watching Castle Rock, don't really know why except that my ex said she watched it. The first season starts slow but it's a lot better than I would have expected from a Stephen King property. Although, having said that, The Outsider was also really good, so maybe his stuff is just better in the hands of a TV room that can shape it.
Castle Rock also has a fairly striking episode where a character with dementia is portrayed in a rather interesting way, but I want to say I've seen a better example of Alzheimer's being done as part of a TV episode. I just can't remember what live-action show it was - I definitely remember the excellent BoJack Horseman episode, but something else I watched around the same time did it, too. Anyone know offhand what TV show pulled off that feat? It was something relatively recent, such that it would have been contemporary to Castle Rock and BoJack doing it.
EDIT: I suppose it could have been Season 3 of True Detective, but I feel like this was a case of a standalone episode that's sticking in my craw.
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But it was still an upset!
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1 hour ago, Brian Fowler said:
Rutgers working hard on blowing this and giving the Big Ten an 0-For day.
This has been the tournament for last-minute, surprise Oral so far...
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Probably because he has. There have been a few articles about all the injuries he's suffered doing various films and the stunt work they involved. He's bound to be more beat up than some pro athletes at this stage in his life.
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Other than that ludicrous fight sequence, which had more plot holes than whatever Zack Snyder is doing these days (btw, is he making a movie? I hadn't heard about it in a while!), this was one of the most compelling things Marvel's ever done, and I say this having loved the whole style and buildup of Wandavision.
Strange thing was, I was just re-watching Man of Steel the other night, and I found myself reminded that my favorite bits of that film are Kal as all these ill-fitting odd job characters as he tries to make a choice about who he's going to be. Maybe we just need a superhero TV show about someone with powers deciding to be a fisherman while Chris Cornell sings in the background. That they're using the downtime sequences for real character development, as opposed to mere contrast (see The Wolverine for the epitome of action-action-pause-action doldrums), is more than welcome.
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Looks like Deshaun Watson's not the only one having problems with Oral! Hey-o!
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So, remember when we talked about how The Mandalorian was mediocre, and the only good reason it had for being pimped so hard by people is because it was a palate cleanser compared to the shit sandwich of the Prequel trilogy & the shit sundae of the Sequel trilogy? And perhaps, at least in some small part, it was also because it follows every single emotional rut that the SW franchise had worn - i.e., stolen from Westerns and heist movies - in the past?
Yeah, me neither.
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2021 MOVIES DISCUSSION
in MOVIES & TV
Posted · Edited by Contentious C
Since I'm currently down to just Amazon Prime, I decided to watch a couple of things I probably wouldn't make the time for otherwise...
48 Hours - WOW is this not only a ridiculously offensive movie, it's also just NOT FUNNY. It's got the one scene where Eddie is pretty great, and otherwise it's just...it's just bad. How was this a hit? Blergh. 90 minutes I'm never getting back. Lots of familiar faces, though.
The Limey - I vaguely remembered that this existed and for some reason thought it had Pete Postelthwaite instead of Terence Stamp. Don't know why I thought that. But it opens very, um, boring 70s/80s action movie for the first 3-4 minutes, and I was thinking to myself, "Wait, Soderbergh directed this, though. This has GOT to be way nerdier than *this*..." and then the flashbacks and jumps start rolling in heavy, and then you know you're watching the movie you were expecting. Pretty good but not great, and a lot of the visual & stylistic choices work really well (such as the lighting effects with the car on fire and a few other, similar scenes). But I really didn't think the ending worked at all.
After he violently murders a small army's worth of people to get to this guy, he just...walks away? Lets him go? Buh? I mean, I get there's supposed to be the parallelism between the two men, but with the way it's shot, it's clear Wilson is supposed to understand, "I created this. I shaped her to be this way; I shaped her to stand up to him. She's dead because I seeded her mind with these choices." So it would have made a lot more sense in my mind if he'd killed himself, but then we cut to the *exact same ending otherwise* with the plane & the archive footage as his last self-serving fantasy before he dies.
Oh, and the Cockney rhyming slang bits were just lame; if you have to grind the moment to a screeching halt so they can be explained each and every time, just...don't fucking include shit like that.