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OCT 2015 MOVIE DISCUSSION


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I also by no means took American Sniper as some grand celebration of Kyle and his actions overseas. I thought Eastwood was both fascinated and terrified by Kyle. Some of the moments in that film, especially towards the end of the second-early third act were a little unnerving.

 

Precisely.  The movie allows me to celebrate Kyle's patriotism while condemning his ideology. 

 

I have no doubt that the man loved his country.  The means he advocated to protect it, however, make my nose itch. 

 

Jefferson said it best in that the American that freely trades liberty for security deserves neither.

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Hey now. The Midwest is full of assholes, but there are huge enclaves of people here that could give less of a shit for anything Clint Eastwood sympathizes with politically. While still being bright enough to understand that High Plains Drifter, Unforgiven, and Gran Torino are great yet incredibly fucked-up movies. 

Oh, I've got no qualms with the midwest.  It's just a common thing I saw people complaining about with this one, that people from the midwest were the ones going to see it and driving its numbers up.

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Honestly, the only thing I genuinely found fascinating about Kyle was the manner of his death.

 

Moral/character issues aside, the dude was not stupid. You don't survive that long in hellish, worn-torn Iraq being stupid. He was a smart guy, undoubtedly.

 

So he gets back home to the safety of the US and loving arms of his family, writes a best-selling book, has a great life, and proceeds to...eh, take a severely mentally ill guy he openly admits he knows is batshit to a shooting range? Um, what the hell? Who does that? Did he have a guilt-induced death wish all along? 

 

The film never really went in it, though. Just one of its many flaws. 

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they didn't get into that OR the crazy lies he'd go around telling people like how he was at Katrina picking off people or whatever the hell. 

 

Yeah, the Ventura stuff was odd too.

 

The guy was more unhinged than most people realized. 

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The film wasn't about that at all, so why would they show it? It was a character's motivation for what he was doing, and you get to see the cause and effect of that on the microcosm.

Your comment would be like me complaining about not seeing whatever caused the world to go to shit in The Road.

Without being super spoiler guy, I'm not saying I need to see what happened to his family. I've already accepted that's his motivation. However, I would like to see the implications of his actions at the end because all the stuff I've seen about Mexican cartels tells me that's not the end of the story. I find that more intriguing than watching a movie about a person's incredible naivety.

Read somewhere that a sequel was already commissioned by Lionsgate and it'd probably be focused del Toro's character and probably the fallout from the first movie.

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The film wasn't about that at all, so why would they show it? It was a character's motivation for what he was doing, and you get to see the cause and effect of that on the microcosm.

Your comment would be like me complaining about not seeing whatever caused the world to go to shit in The Road.

Without being super spoiler guy, I'm not saying I need to see what happened to his family. I've already accepted that's his motivation. However, I would like to see the implications of his actions at the end because all the stuff I've seen about Mexican cartels tells me that's not the end of the story. I find that more intriguing than watching a movie about a person's incredible naivety.

Read somewhere that a sequel was already commissioned by Lionsgate and it'd probably be focused del Toro's character and probably the fallout from the first movie.

 

 

Sign me up for that shit.

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Watched It Follows and thought it was scary as shit!  It's about a girl who ends up being chased/followed by a demon/spirit/ghost whatever.

 

That scene where

she's in her house and the window gets broken and she goes to the kitchen and finds the girl slowly stalking here in the kitchen, runs upstairs and locks the door, then lets her friend in, then the other friend knocks on her door and she opens it up and the huge scary dude comes up from behind the friend

totally made me leap.  Only topped later by the scene where

she's on the beach, you see her sister beside her and the two guys but not the other girl, then you see said girl approaching from behind over her shoulder and the camera slowly pans around and shows that the other girl's actually swimming and it's the demon/ghost/whatever coming up berhind her.

 

I really loved it.  I'm admittedly early in my 2015 watching, but I wouldn't be shocked if I had this Top 10, maybe Top 5 come the EOY list.

 

Also watched

 

Red Army which is a documentary about the Russian Ice Hockey team of the 70s/80s.  It was interesting but didn't really delve as much into their training methods as I would have liked, and only veiled references to what a monster of a coach Tikhonov was.  Also, I would have loved them to call Slava Fetisov on his shit a little more.  There were a couple times he said things that seemed untrue/double-standard and it was just let go.

 

Cobain: Montage of Heck which is the documentary about Kurt Cobain.  If you're wanting insight into the music, you're not going to get much of it right here, as this is more of a focus on Cobain, the person.  There's some interesting stuff and I thought the animated footage set to recordings of Cobain speaking were really well-done and super effective, but I thought it was weird how quickly they glossed over hugely important moments in his life (Signing with Sub Pop, replacing the first drummer with Dave Grohl, signing with Geffen, recording 'Nevermind') are all either not addressed at all (In the case of Grohl and recording 'Nevermind') or just barely mentioned in passing (the two label signings). Still, it's quite good and the last stretch is super-depressing with footage of Kurt nodding off while holding his daughter, being junkie-thin, and covered in sores.

 

Hausu which might be the most insane movie I've ever seen.  It's definitely worth watching, just for the scads of insanity throughout.  I think my favourite process of watching the film might have been going to IMDB afterwards where someone posited the theory that

The movie is a metaphor for girls becoming women, witness all the blood in the end, symbolizing menstruation.  And the way growing up you sometimes have to leave your friends behind which, fair point, seems like a reasonable explanation, but was replied to with a guy going "So why the hell did that guy turn into bananas than!?" which is also a very fair point.

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Hausu which might be the most insane movie I've ever seen. It's definitely worth watching, just for the scads of insanity throughout. I think my favourite process of watching the film might have been going to IMDB afterwards where someone posited the theory that

The movie is a metaphor for girls becoming women, witness all the blood in the end, symbolizing menstruation. And the way growing up you sometimes have to leave your friends behind which, fair point, seems like a reasonable explanation, but was replied to with a guy going "So why the hell did that guy turn into bananas than!?" which is also a very fair point.

Dick allegory, obviously.

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Watched American Sniper.

 

It was fucking terrible. Just a really boring and a massive blowjob for the memory of Chris Kyle, just none of the wacky shit he did. Fuck Clint Eastwood.

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Yeah, I watched about the last half of AMERICAN SNIPER on HBO last night, and I thought it was just insufferable.

Every character in the movie just spends the whole time going, WAY TO GO, CHRIS! YOU'RE A LEGEND! THANK YOU SO MUCH, CHRIS! I'M SO PROUD OF YOU!

Eventually, I was like, fuck it, shoot ME, Mustafa.

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Yeah, I watched about the last half of AMERICAN SNIPER on HBO last night, and I thought it was just insufferable.

Every character in the movie just spends the whole time going, WAY TO GO, CHRIS! YOU'RE A LEGEND! THANK YOU SO MUCH, CHRIS! I'M SO PROUD OF YOU!

Eventually, I was like, fuck it, shoot ME, Mustafa.

 

You're right! Holy shit you're right. I spent the majority of that movie thinking it was the same shit over and over again, but you hit the nail on the head. Everyone treats Chris Kyle like he's Superman and it's just absurd. Then they spend a whole 4 fucking minutes on Chris with PTSD before he's all better for just hanging out with some wounded vets. And then, the movie is over. I liked Bradley Cooper a lot in it, but fuck that movie.

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Since it's way too early to start the thread already - Chris Rock will be hosting the Oscars

The best choice.

 

I mean, aside from pie-in-the-sky forever dream host Joel McHale who would be really funny, then never invited back.

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Watched Jupiter Ascending.  It's really bad.  Like, the movie has the innate ability to forget scenes which just happened, for instance a scene where Mila Kunis is going to marry a bad guy by placing her hand on an iPad-like device that occurs in slow-motion while heroic Channing Tatum is trying to save her and not fifteen minutes later, she has to renounce her stuff by placing a hand on another iPad-like device that occurs in slow-motion while heroic Channing Tatum is trying to save her.  How did someone not realize that they're literally repeating scenes that JUST happened?!  The first 30-40 minutes aren't bad, honestly, with lots of exciting action sequences, but the movie grinds to a complete halt for the next 40-50 minutes as they try to explain things (And there is a senseless 4+ minute sequence that, in the words of Will Leitch "the Wachowskis decided to make some sort of point about intergalactic bureaucracy and governmental red tape" and is "honestly one of the most bewildering things I've ever seen in a movie").  And Eddie Redmayne?!  You'd swear that he didn't know how to act if you didn't have the knowledge of his having won an Academy Award!  He does this terrible affected accent that sounds basically like a 'Family Guy' parody of what a British royal would sound like.  It's just BAD.  Every minute he's on the screen is absolute torture for the viewer.  Plus, everything sounds or looks like it's cribbed from something else: the score sounds like 'Duel of the Fates' remixed; Channing Tatum flying his ship looks uncannily like the inside of the giant robots in 'Pacific Rim'; the sound effects sound like Transformers transforming; the outfits look like they're out of 'Dune'; Tatum's flying skates can't help but remind you of Dazzler; and, somehow, Mila Kunis screaming in an early chase sequence sounds EXACTLY like the sound R2D2 makes when he gets shot.  It's honestly staggeringly bad.

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The only thing I disagree with you is the first act not being bad. It was plenty bad enough, and it just kept getting worse, UNBELIEVABLY worse. I actually walked out of the theater halfway through the movie (which I never do) and asked for my money back. According to the theater employees, I was far from alone, they'd had a shitload of walkouts and refund requests for this one.

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The only thing I disagree with you is the first act not being bad. It was plenty bad enough, and it just kept getting worse, UNBELIEVABLY worse. I actually walked out of the theater halfway through the movie (which I never do) and asked for my money back. According to the theater employees, I was far from alone, they'd had a shitload of walkouts and refund requests for this one.

That's a fair point.  What I probably should have said was "The action sequences in the first act aren't bad"...I'd forgotten about Jupiter Jones, seller of eggs; Jupiter Jones, cleaner of toilets; and Sean Bean, master of bees.

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