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JULY 2017 MOVIE THREAD


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2 hours ago, J.T. said:

Working under the relatively safe assumption that Bats has worked for Doc before or at least they respect each other's reputation, it is evident that they both realize the benefits of collaboration. 

Doc has the plan and Bats gets to indulge in murder for the sake of entertainment while also making money.

Since neither one of them is in jail, to date the relationship worked out up to the events of the movie. 

Baby has obviously not worked with neither Bats nor Griff before their respective jobs since we know that Baby has been the driver for all of Doc's jobs that required a wheelman and both Bats and Griff give Baby a lot of shit about Baby's habits and abilities which implies that they've never met.

The comedy of errors begins when Doc tells the crew that they need to pick up the hardware for the Post Office job themselves..  

Doc knows the identity of the arms dealers and does not bother to include the crew in on this info.  We know this is the key blunder since Doc meticulously hints the audience in on the fact that he normally supplies the crew with weapons, but for whatever reason (plot advancement via the mistaken identity gimmick) this time the crew needs to fetch their own guns.

Doc introduces the x-factor by not sticking to his own game plan and making his own arrangements.

Who does he send?  Two paranoid criminals who will kill rather than be caught and one guy who uses psychotic delusions of entitlement to justify homicide.

Well, that's kinda the benefit of a long con. If I'm trying to set up someone like Bats, it ain't going to be a Yankees meet and greet to catch him for delinquent child support like the beginning of Sea of Love.

Yeah, here are some "corrupt" cops you don't know. Oh, I didn't tell you about that? My bad!

But that's a minor squabble I have with the film. Everything else made sense to me.

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12 hours ago, Elsalvajeloco said:

Well, that's kinda the benefit of a long con. If I'm trying to set up someone like Bats, it ain't going to be a Yankees meet and greet to catch him for delinquent child support like the beginning of Sea of Love.

Yeah, here are some "corrupt" cops you don't know. Oh, I didn't tell you about that? My bad!

Well, yeah.  I chalked this up as Edgar Wright being British as there are quite a few UK crime films like Lock, Stock and Layer Cake where the comedy of errors begins with the boss guy taking a need to know attitude with his hirelings and things go to shit from there.

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16 hours ago, J.T. said:

1) I don't think that JD and No-Nose were idiots.  They were just out of their league and they definitely weren't professional enough to keep cool when things went sideways.

2) The job was a simple smash and grab.  No vaults to crack or security to scope.  Not a complicated scenario until Bats murdered one of the guards in cold blood.

JD and No-Nose did their job perfectly, regardless of the masks. Any issue on that job was purely because of Bats.

 

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1 hour ago, Ace said:

JD and No-Nose did their job perfectly, regardless of the masks. Any issue on that job was purely because of Bats.

JD panicked and left his weapon behind and that's what got him in the trunk of that car that need to be sunsetted.

And yeah, that chain of events started when Bats killed the guard and the escape went squirrely.

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Went to see The House last night and I enjoyed it but felt that it really got shafted on its Summer release. This movie should've been a Winter/Fall release to at least try to score some decent box office. AS it is, Jason Manzoutkas just kills it the whole movie, he needs to be in more stuff

James

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3 hours ago, J.H. said:

AS it is, Jason Manzoutkas just kills it the whole movie, he needs to be in more stuff

I had been planning to see The House until it got not-so-great reviews - but this kinda rekindles my desire to see it as Mantzoukas was actually one of the reasons I was interested.

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I've decided for a summer project to watch all of the Oscar-nominated Best Pictures since 2001 that I have never seen (I'm really dreading 'War Horse' and 'Seabiscuit', I can tell you that much...).  I've tackled two already

La La Land: Didn't do a whole lot for me.  I felt one of the things that hurt it, as far as I'm concerned, is that neither Ryan Gosling nor Emma Stone has much variety to their voice, so all the songs kind of start to sound the same.  One of the things about something like, say, 'Chicago' is that the cast is so huge that you get a wide variety of voices and styles with all the different people singing (Zellweger, Zeta-Jones, Reilly, Latifah, Gere).  It was all right, but nothing really grabbed me.

Moonlight: I liked a lot.  It's a heavy friggin' film but there was enough neat sequences and experimentalism that it felt different to me.  That said, the subtitles (It's so hot I've got to watch the movie with fans-a-blowing and quiet dialogue's impossible to hear over them so I've been going with subtitles) are a little too descriptive.  I never needed to read the phrase "[Orgasmic Grunting]".

Outside of the Oscar purview, I watched

The Darjeeling Limited which I watched years ago and did not care for, but enjoyed it a lot more now.  I think taken as a rather broad comedy it's more succesful than if you hold it up as anything higher.  For instance, my sister bought me this massive Wes Anderson book years ago and I got a kick out of Matt Zoller-Seitz talking about the scene where the brothers throw the luggage away as being a metaphor so on-the-nose that it's like intentional parody and I thought "No, that wasn't intentional parody, that was something that Anderson clearly thought was clever ("Throwing the baggage away will be like throwing away their emotional baggage away! Brilliant!") and when everyone groaned about how obvious it was, now Zoller-Seitz is trying to say it's intentional".

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk: I REALLY wanted to see this last fall after seeing some previews and write-ups on the filmmaking but it came right around the time of my mom's surgery (She's fine btw) and I just never got a chance to see it.  And I'm pretty glad that I didn't see it in the theaters as it was kinda really uneven.  The war sequences are quite stunning, basically everything that doesn't take place in America really, but everything else feels really artificial.  Like a stage director shouting at a bunch of soldiers to get off the stage, and security guards mouthing off to them feels like stuff that would NEVER happen when a military unit is being honored for heroism which doesn't even touch on the inane

scene at the end when the stage director and a bunch of his friends jump the soldiers and attack them with pipes and NOTHING is done about it


I also felt like it covered a lot of ground covered better by other films and couldn't really figure out what it was trying to say.  Vin Diesel is actually quite good in a tiny role, while Steve Martin playing, essentially, Jerry Jones is really weird.  Kristen Stewart's actually quite good, but her relationship with her brother was a little weird, as he played with her hair at one point as she showed him the scars on her abdomen.

Spider-man: Homecoming: was pretty great.  I loved that it was NOT an origin story.  He off-handedly tells his friend "I got bit by a radioactive spider" and that's that.  Lots of fun smaller roles: Bokeem Woodbine, Hannibal Burress, Martin Starr, Marisa Tomei, Zendaya, Michael Mando, Kenneth Choi and Tony Revolori as well as 

Donald Glover, not sure if that merits a spoiler or not, but i was happy to see him!

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War for the Planet of The Apes was fucking awesome.  It is more faithful to the novel and the 70's franchise than you might think.

It is not a coincidence that Woody Harrelson's character resembles Marlin Brando's Col. Kurtz from Apocalypse Now.

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On 7/10/2017 at 1:00 AM, caley said:

pider-man: Homecoming: was pretty great.  I loved that it was NOT an origin story.  He off-handedly tells his friend "I got bit by a radioactive spider" and that's that.  

Well that seals me not wanting to see it. I already disliked him being Iron Man .Jr and hot Aunt May. Don't do another origin story, but show some respect for it. 

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Oh my God, Dunkirk. What a mixed bag you are.

It is a perfectly fine war movie even though there is a bit of history being written by the victors here. 

Historically, it was a full on retreat, but to watch it onscreen you'd have thought it was a tactical egress.  Dunkirk was "let's get the fuck out of here," not " we will sally back to the narrows and regroup for a counter attack."

Also, the disjointed storylines and quick cuts converging on a single focal point worked perfectly fine in the Dark Knight movies, but holy shit is it ever unnerving in a war movie.

Also there is so much eye roll inducing deus ex machine at the end that it must be seen to be believed.

On the plus side, Nolan makes warfare even more personal here than in Saving Private Ryan.  To get to know these men and hear about their lives and realize that they're all going to die is heartbreaking, especially when you factor in that the Germans's plan is to conserve their forces and defeat the British is to allow the soldiers to retreat to the rescue vessels and then sink as many of them as possible..

It is also really impressive how little bloodshed and gore there is when compared to modern treatments of war films.  Nolan lets the explosions and the screams of dying soldiers handle the war is hell portion of the movie.

Of the Nolan-ish movies, I hold Dunkirk in higher esteem than I do Interstellar and maybe Inception, but Memento and The Prestige still tower over the list and part of me wishes that he return to the minimalist storytelling that made Memento and The Prestige so astounding.

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Valerian is also ridiculously stupid and awesome and just like the old school comics.  

It is a campy European space opera where technology may as well be magic and the abilities of aliens have nothing to do with actual biology and fuck physics anyway..

It is Starcrash with a much larger budget and I mean that in the best possible way.

I have no idea where all of these negative reviews are coming from.  These assholes obviously have no sense of humor.

There is a character named Bob the Pirate .  Any reviewer that comes down hard on this movie for its lack of seriousness totally does not get the point.

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I described the Valerian & Lauraline comics as "Space Opera in the Roger Moore Bond style"  Then they end the movie with a classic Moore Bond "stuck in a life raft for 2 hours until we get rescued, what will we do until then?" riff.  I about died.

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A Ghost Story completely wrecked me.  Was holding back tears for at least 2/3 of the movie.  I don't think I had ever been seriously worried that I would start audibly sobbing in a theater but it happened here.  Not perfect (for one thing, there's one minor character who I think everyone would hate) but it's my #1 of the year right now.

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1 minute ago, S.K.o.S. said:

A Ghost Story completely wrecked me.  Was holding back tears for at least 2/3 of the movie.  I don't think I had ever been seriously worried that I would start audibly sobbing in a theater but it happened here.  Not perfect (for one thing, there's one minor character who I think everyone would hate) but it's my #1 of the year right now.

There are too many people prefacing their personal reviews of this movie to me with the fact that they cried while watching it.

I am not ready for this shit yet.  It is summer and I am supposed to be having fun at the movies.. 

I usually reserve my bawling during matinees period for the fall releases.

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4 hours ago, J.T. said:

Valerian is also ridiculously stupid and awesome and just like the old school comics.  

It is a campy European space opera where technology may as well be magic and the abilities of aliens have nothing to do with actual biology and fuck physics anyway..

It is Starcrash with a much larger budget and I mean that in the best possible way.

I have no idea where all of these negative reviews are coming from.  These assholes obviously have no sense of humor.

There is a character named Bob the Pirate.  Any reviewer that comes down hard on this movie for its lack of seriousness totally does not get the point.

I saw it Saturday and thought it was pretty fun.

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Last two weekends I've seen War for the Planet of the Apes and Dunkirk in IMAX.    Apes was awesome.  A tremendous end to the first trilogy.  It's heart breaking at times but so well done. 

Dunkirk was an amazing experience but I wonder if the experience itself is what I loved and not so much the actual movie.  Sitting there in the IMAX,  it's crazy good.  When I watch it at home I don't know if I'll feel the same way. 

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57 minutes ago, Niners Fan in CT said:

Last two weekends I've seen War for the Planet of the Apes and Dunkirk in IMAX.    Apes was awesome.  A tremendous end to the first trilogy.  It's heart breaking at times but so well done. 

Dunkirk was an amazing experience but I wonder if the experience itself is what I loved and not so much the actual movie.  Sitting there in the IMAX,  it's crazy good.  When I watch it at home I don't know if I'll feel the same way. 

The experience. I couldn't understand 3/4s of what Tom Hardy said or like most of the dialogue. Didn't need to understand it, apparently.

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