Movie 2023 MOVIE DISCUSSION THREAD

[Dolfan in NYC]

The WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike is moving to its own thread.  This is a massively big deal and is going to result in the shutdown of a lot of productions.  So here we go....

 

[Zimbra]

https://twitter.com/Futurhythm/status/1680266566984941568?t=Qgeb2BCp44AGmrtTuealbA&s=19

Imagine just shooting the shit with Chow Yun Fat.

[Curt McGirt]

I haven't seen this since I bought Hard Boiled on VHS back in the '90s. Daaaaaaamn is it awesome. 

[Zimbra]

4 minutes ago, Curt McGirt said:

I haven't seen this since I bought Hard Boiled on VHS back in the '90s. Daaaaaaamn is it awesome. 

Hell yeah, I bought the two pack of Hard Boiled and The Killer at Suncoast and watched them to death.  I'm pretty sure they're both still kicking around my condo somewhere.

[Curt McGirt]

I love how he never has to reload his guns until the very end (a Movie Syndrome that David Schow talked about in a Fangoria article once) and how the shotgun just makes things explode 

I think I bought Hard Boiled at a grocery store? Maybe it was a Circus Video that couldn't get it rented. I dunno. Still have the copy, though! 

Edited July 17, 2023 by Curt McGirt

[odessasteps]

 

[odessasteps]

Also todays anniversary, what a great day for 80s movies. 
 

 

[Curt McGirt]

Damn, I have no idea why I never bothered watching all of Rambo: Last Blood. I saw some of the ending on the upper channels once but this is on AMC and all they are censoring is the translated cursing on the screen. NOTHING else. Decapitations, people getting blown up, faces cut, everything. And though it's slightly improbable Stallone is still a trooper and it's a real sad story. The end is INCREDIBLE.

What makes this double ridiculous for me was that I had a Rambocycle and photos of me dressed up AS Rambo when I was a toddler, not just my love for the movies. 

EDIT: Oh, and El Oso from Snowfall is the main villain! 

Edited July 20, 2023 by Curt McGirt

[Pete]

As of last week I'm officially "between gigs, maaaaaan" again, so I'm dipping my toes into the 70s "Cannonball" road rally/chase genre. I started with The Gumball Rally... it's shockingly good, with a lot of great car action ('natch), stupid cops and some nifty footage of mid-70s NYC. The only truly big names in it are Raul Julia, who lovingly chews the scenery as a cross between Mario Andretti and Pepe Le Pew, and Gary Busey as himself... but the lack of top stars actually helps as you get into everyone's characters without getting distracted by ones stardom. Amazingly, everyone does their own driving and stunts in this which is pretty damn impressive.

At some point I'll check out Cannonball, Eat My Dust and Grand Theft Auto. 

[AxB]

I'm watching The Woman King from last year. It's good. Feels a bit jarring, we're in Africa and all the African characters are speaking English, but when the white people show up, they speak Portuguese to each other. One of those films that tells you early on "There's a really big war fight coming up!" and then makes you wait while it does a coming of age training montage for most of the runtime. But I nitpick. It's a good film. Lots of very good actors, giving very strong performances.

The Kingdom they're defending is called Dahomey, though. They keep talking about how we have to defend Dahomey, and it's like they were begging people to meme it about defending The Homies.

[Curt McGirt]

"But you have to defend the Homies! It's only, uh, pertinent to defend the Homies."

[driver]

I've been watching Babylon in fits and spurts. One hell of a cast, but it's over three hours long. The first thing that got my attention was the scene with the elephant.

[Travis Sheldon]

Some recent viewings:

Violent Night - Christmas action movie with David Harbour as the real Santa. Lots of great guest stars like John Leguizamo, Beverly DeAngelo, and Edi Patterson basically doing her Judy Gemstone schtick.

It was a fun and extremely violent flick, aptly titled.

 

Renfield - I'm really only familiar with Nicholas Hoult from Mad Max Fury Road, so I was neutral on him going into this one.

Nicholas Cage was great as Dracula. And I did appreciate the London After Midnight teeth.

OTT violent a la John Wick, but fun.

My wife liked it more than me, I think.

I did dig the bit at the beginning where they gave backstory on Renfield and Drac's relationship featuring Hoult and Cage inserted into Dracula '31 scenes.

Oh, and Awkwafina gave another performance where I did not want her character to end up in a volcano. So that's a good performance on her part.

[J.T.]

Oh, and They Cloned Tyrone is fucking tremendous.  Equal parts blaxsploitation, sci-fi, and conspiracy theory blended into an absurd yet entertaining fable.

Edited July 24, 2023 by J.T.

[Craig H]

Saw Oppenheimer the other night. It was...fine. I automatically liked it more than Dunkirk, Tenet, and TDKR by virtue of the fact that I could actually hear dialogue and the sound editing wasn't complete garbage. As a child of the 80s and someone who to this day is still deathly afraid of nuclear weapons and nuclear war, I have a deep seeded dislike and discomfort with the subject matter and that at any point, I feel like they could have turned the ship around and not let the genie out of the lamp. Unfortunately, they pressed forward and now we have the world we live in today.

My hope going into this was that this would do for this generation what The Day After did for generations alive in the 80s. While it wasn't necessarily that, it did sorta approach that. What really surprised me was how much of this movie was this kinda/sorta courtroom drama. The editing was hyper, hyper, hyper kinetic with a lot of cuts and a lot of cuts between the present (in the movie), the past, and the future. It was Nolan at his most Nolan-est in terms of fucking with timelines. It made for an interesting and very intense watch...up until a point. Sorry if this is a spoiler, but the Trinity test happens right around the 2 hour mark, which means there's a whole hour of a movie left. Between all of the cuts and a score that is nearly unending and plays in every single scene, it really made me start to feel the run time of the movie. Where Endgame, or Hateful Eight, or even Dead Reckoning felt like a breeze, this did not. Paradoxically, I found that last hour of the movie utterly fascinating. I've read so much and have seen so much about Oppenheimer, the man, and the Manhattan Project (hell, my wife's grandpa was a metallurgist who worked on the project in Chicago...I think I'm allowed to say that?), that the final third of the movie was maybe one of the most interesting aspects to the movie. I've since seen some opinions that disagreed with that, but that was my own opinion anyway.

Could Nolan have cut this movie down by a lot? Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, he could have trimmed 30 minutes or maybe 20 minutes in the first 2 acts and 10 in the last act to have a very smooth, epic movie.

As for the effects, for all of the talk of Nolan using practical effects, I was very, very, very underwhelmed by what the Trinity test was on screen. It just looked like any other explosion in a movie. I did like the practical effects used throughout the movie to simulate particles moving around and stuff like that, but the actual explosion was very...whatever. A couple nitpicks with it...So in the explosion, you see the tower holding the gadget blow apart in one of the shots. Like, you basically see debris from the tower get launched in the explosion, which wouldn't have happened. In a millionth of a second, it would have been vaporized and not visually blown apart. Also for the actual test, and this is the most nitpickiest thing to nitpick, they used small rockets that shot up with smoke trails behind them moments before detonation to see how the force of the explosion would move those trails of smoke. That never happens in this movie for whatever reason.

Despite all of that, like I said, the movie was fine, but the performances were outstanding. Cillian Murphy looks like someone who has been haunted by a death eater his enter life. Throughout the entire movie he carries the weight of this awful decision on his shoulders and it really shows. He's more than just a ghost in this. It's one of the best performances I've seen. RDJ does a grab job as Strauss, but he does slip into a little RDJ-ness a few times. I think the weirdest performance was from Emily Blunt. It wasn't bad, but her accent she used in the movie sounded very weird, very "mob woman, gun moll" sounding.

Ultimately, this is very middle of the pack for Nolan movies. I like TDK, Inception, and Interstellar more than this, but I definitely liked it more than TDKR, Tenet, Following, Insomnia, and Dunkirk. It's probably right there with Memento, the Prestige, and Batman Begins in terms of enjoyment.

[elizium]

Barbie fucking rules. A million stars for Barbie.

I absolutely need to own Ken's Hollywood Hogan fit from the last third of the movie.

[J.T.]

15 hours ago, Craig H said:

As for the effects, for all of the talk of Nolan using practical effects, I was very, very, very underwhelmed by what the Trinity test was on screen. It just looked like any other explosion in a movie. I did like the practical effects used throughout the movie to simulate particles moving around and stuff like that, but the actual explosion was very...whatever.

I feel that the explosion was somewhat accurately portrayed.  I believe that the reason the Trinity scene felt a bit lackluster is that most of us who remember the Cold War are conditioned to think of the various H-Bomb detonations and the later Pacific thermonuclear tests when we envision nuclear explosions. 

The Trinity test, by comparison, would not be nearly as "grand" as say, Crossroads Baker or Tumbler-Sapper.

We also tend to mix our metaphors.   A lot or people mistakenly believe that the famous movie clip of the target house being blown apart by an atomic shockwave shows the effect of Trinity, when in fact that footage is from the Teapot Apple series of hydrogen bomb tests.  Those devises possessed far more destructive power than Trinity did.

Trinity barely yielded 20 KTs while future tests yielded tens of MTs.  At 60 MTs, the Russian "Tsar Bomba" was over a thousand times more powerful than Fat Man or Little Boy.  That is a terrifying statistic.

If there was an element missing from the scene, it would probably be the lack of extended illumination during the blast, but you can't get that with conventional explosives.  The "flash" is the results of x-rays from the supercritical core ionizing the air around the bomb and turning it into plasma before and during the actual explosion..

Edited July 26, 2023 by J.T.

[Craig H]

3 hours ago, J.T. said:

I feel that the explosion was somewhat accurately portrayed.  I believe that the reason the Trinity scene felt a bit lackluster is that most of us who remember the Cold War are conditioned to think of the various H-Bomb detonations and the later Pacific thermonuclear tests when we envision nuclear explosions. 

The Trinity test, by comparison, would not be nearly as "grand" as say, Crossroads Baker or Tumbler-Sapper.

We also tend to mix our metaphors.   A lot or people mistakenly believe that the famous movie clip of the target house being blown apart by an atomic shockwave shows the effect of Trinity, when in fact that footage is from the Teapot Apple series of hydrogen bomb tests.  Those devises possessed far more destructive power than Trinity did.

Trinity barely yielded 20 KTs while future tests yielded tens of MTs.  At 60 MTs, the Russian "Tsar Bomba" was over a thousand times more powerful than Fat Man or Little Boy.  That is a terrifying statistic.

If there was an element missing from the scene, it would probably be the lack of extended illumination during the blast, but you can't get that with conventional explosives.  The "flash" is the results of x-rays from the supercritical core ionizing the air around the bomb and turning it into plasma before and during the actual explosion..

I'm pretty aware of all of the other tests done and wonder if maybe people might be getting the wrong message seeing what was on screen and then thinking about what they've seen elsewhere. I'd hate for anyway to walk away from the movie and think, eh, those bombs ain't so bad! But you know, dumb people are everywhere.

Also, when Nolan spoke of using practical effects only for the explosion, I wondered how he would handle the fireball towering into the sky around 50k to 70k feet. I thought maybe he would have used some kind of modeling or something like that to mimic that shot. In the end, it just didn't happen. I'm also surprised the movie didn't touch on any of the accidents that happened at Los Alamos or in Chicago. I thought that was maybe a missed opportunity since they were leaning so heavily on Oppenheimer's credibility, but maybe Nolan thought it just wasn't relevant to Oppenheimer's story and I don't believe those accidents came up in testimony and were revealed much later.

I don't know...I think I just wanted more of a message, like a flashing red light saying "THIS STUFF IS AWFUL, MANY OF YOU ARE UNAWARE BECAUSE YOU'RE YOUNG, BUT THIS SHIT IS TERRIBLE AND WILL END THE WORLD" and while we got some of that, the movie didn't hit you over the head with it and you had to see it in Cillian Murphy's face. That said, again, I was surprised by how courtroom drama-y the movie was. For whatever reason, some of it reminded me of Michael Mann's The Insider and 12 Angry Men. Funnily enough, Red Letter Media made their own 12 Angry Men comparison.

[J.T.]

14 minutes ago, Craig H said:

In the end, it just didn't happen. I'm also surprised the movie didn't touch on any of the accidents that happened at Los Alamos or in Chicago.

I think if they had included all of the Demon Core stuff, the movie would've had another hour added to the runtime.

[Robert S]

Come on, movies have already told us that nuclear explosions are not that devastating if you know what you are doing:

Not having seen the movie yet (maybe this weekend if I can find an OV screening), it's not that surprising that a movie about Oppenheimer would not have the same effect as let's say The Day After or On the Beach.

[Craig H]

1 hour ago, J.T. said:

I think if they had included all of the Demon Core stuff, the movie would've had another hour added to the runtime.

This is sorta making me want to check out American Prometheus from the library just to learn more because I wonder if there were accusations of Oppenheimer running a sloppy shop between the different locations that goes beyond spies being involved. And not just the demon core stuff, but other accidents, the number of workers that were sickened in Chicago and the dumping of waste there. Presumably, you'd think there would be spies at each location. Sadly, my wife's grandpa isn't with us anymore to answer some of these questions and her dad is a notorious bullshitter so he's not remotely reliable to relay anything his own dad experienced.

[Contentious C]

6 hours ago, J.T. said:

I feel that the explosion was somewhat accurately portrayed.  I believe that the reason the Trinity scene felt a bit lackluster is that most of us who remember the Cold War are conditioned to think of the various H-Bomb detonations and the later Pacific thermonuclear tests when we envision nuclear explosions. 

The Trinity test, by comparison, would not be nearly as "grand" as say, Crossroads Baker or Tumbler-Sapper.

We also tend to mix our metaphors.   A lot or people mistakenly believe that the famous movie clip of the target house being blown apart by an atomic shockwave shows the effect of Trinity, when in fact that footage is from the Teapot Apple series of hydrogen bomb tests.  Those devises possessed far more destructive power than Trinity did.

Trinity barely yielded 20 KTs while future tests yielded tens of MTs.  At 60 MTs, the Russian "Tsar Bomba" was over a thousand times more powerful than Fat Man or Little Boy.  That is a terrifying statistic.

If there was an element missing from the scene, it would probably be the lack of extended illumination during the blast, but you can't get that with conventional explosives.  The "flash" is the results of x-rays from the supercritical core ionizing the air around the bomb and turning it into plasma before and during the actual explosion..

Yeah, there's a guy on Youtube named Kyle Hill who goes into depth about a lot of nuclear-related incidents and things to worry about, and his video on Hiroshima was really fucking interesting.  The things that bomb did were basically war crimes to (thankfully) successfully stop a war, and it was just an air burst that didn't even detonate correctly.  Like anyone needs more things to be terrified of...then again, if you're as close to a likely bomb site as I am, it'll be over quickly anyway.  Probably.

Edited July 26, 2023 by Contentious C

[Robert S]

4 hours ago, Craig H said:

This is sorta making me want to check out American Prometheus from the library just to learn more because I wonder if there were accusations of Oppenheimer running a sloppy shop between the different locations that goes beyond spies being involved. And not just the demon core stuff, but other accidents, the number of workers that were sickened in Chicago and the dumping of waste there. Presumably, you'd think there would be spies at each location. Sadly, my wife's grandpa isn't with us anymore to answer some of these questions and her dad is a notorious bullshitter so he's not remotely reliable to relay anything his own dad experienced.

I read Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb (which I think is kind of the standard text about the Manhattan Project - at least in terms of popular science books) about a decade ago and don't remember anything discussions in the direction of negligence. I suppose the combination of completely new science, lack of experience how to deal with radioactive material, time pressure, size of the project etc. just made the couple of accidents inevitable.

[GuerrillaMonsoon]

Yep, Barbie was fucking amazing.

Went in thinking I'd get some kids film with massive amounts of winks to the adult audience, ala Lego Movie, Wreck It Ralph etc.

Nah, it's a critical look at hegemony and patriarchial power structures in the context of an existential crisis, and everyone seems to be having an amazingly fun time while they do it.

It's a brave movie to make in the context of literal billions of toy sales on the line, and they've done a great job. Nice to see brave script writing be rewarded, when they could have easily done a Super Mario type movie here instead.

Edited July 27, 2023 by GuerrillaMonsoon

[odessasteps]

I started watching the British Oppenheimer TV series from 1980 with Sam Waterson in the title role.