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2021 MOVIES DISCUSSION


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On 12/7/2021 at 4:32 PM, J.T. said:

You know what?  I do remember Janine trying to flirt with Egon in the first movie and he chose to talk about something crazy like cheese mold or something. 

Janine asks him if he has any hobbies. Egon's response is "I Collect Spores, Molds, & Fungus."

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Hey, movies!  They're a thing! I still watch them.  Day ...shit, how long has it been? Right.  Day 149 and counting of New Movies Every Day, Why Didn't I Just Watch Juliette Binoche Films Instead of Disney Edition. 

Hot Garbage

Lady, You Shot Me: Life and Death of Sam Cooke - This was the kind of subject matter that could have made for a much, much, much, much better film.  But holy crap, is this done in as amateurish a manner as anything I've seen.  Told out of order, repeats itself when it shouldn't, feels like it's padding time with some of the material instead of giving you a through line of events.  Just not good.  I wish someone would do something more definitive about this, or at least go to greater lengths to dig up real information (where are interviews with his kids, for instance).

Daydream Nation - Thanks for saddling the title of a great album with also the title of a boring-ass, cliched movie.  Kat Dennings is just doing Kat Dennings things here - she's like the thicc Awkwafina in that regard - while she attempts to make a relationship choice between a thoroughly demented Josh Lucas and a boy with the charisma of one of Egon's spores, molds, and fungus discussed above.  Oh, and there's some serial killer stuff in the background that allegedly passes for a plot.  This is one of those movies trying to put its finger on the pulse of things, a la American Beauty, but it turns out more like another shitty copycat, specifically The Chumscrubber, if you ever saw that massive turd.

Ice Age - How have they made about a billion of these when the first one was this bad?  God, this has to be the most bland animated film maybe ever.  The animation style is garbage, the plot is as insipid as they come, there's maybe one scene of genuine emotion (the cave painting bit), and the rest just casually glosses over how animals actually interact, because hey, let's just spend all our time lying to kids about animal behavior.  I'm sure that's never had any negative repercussions, like children climbing into zoo enclosures or anything.  Also, John Leguizamo should probably be barred from doing anything, anywhere that doesn't involve one-man shows or dressing in drag.  Hell, if he were in drag in John Wick, it'd make that better, too.

Acceptable

Big Hero 6 - Big ol' pile of Acceptable.  This is all right, but that's kind of it.  Most of the characters feel underdeveloped, since they spend all their time on jokey stuff and the main friendship, and they give too much time to T.J. Miller's dumb garbage.  It isn't as actively boring as, say, Frozen was, but very middle-of-the-road for recent Disney.  I think my feelings on this movie are best summed up this way: the only thing that made a memorable impression on me is that I wouldn't mind if San Fransokyo really existed and I lived in that world, so I could ask Hiro's aunt out on a date.  She seemed nice.

Wuthering Heights (1992) - OK, maybe I didn't want to watch 10 Juliette Binoche movies in a row if they're as dull as this.  Granted, that's because the story is dull, and remaking it so often is dull, and I'm not sure this version adds anything, except as proof that Ralph Fiennes has always been extraordinarily good at spitting pure venom on the screen.   I think I read the book maybe 30+ years ago, and I barely remembered the plot, but all I can take away from this is that it's about two selfish crybabies who deserved each other, and if their lives sucked, maybe it was their own damn fault.  And no, I don't care if their inbred kids are happy.  The acting is fine, but...I mean, who needed this?  The only Bronte anything I'd actually stop to watch is the Cary Joji Fukunaga Jane Eyre, and this ain't that.

Brave - Man, more weird Pixar.  I don't think this is as bad as Frozen, but it might be the closest entrant I've seen.  It's just a big, fat pile of ridiculous stereotypes, but hey, we're stereotyping white folks, so that's totally fine and acceptable!  They can be drunken, violent, bare-assed, boastful idiots 99% of the time and...well...yeah, actually, it is in fact totally fine to stereotype them that way.  When minorities flip over cars, they call it rioting; when we do it, it's St. Patrick's Day.  Is this another good enough indicator of how little I cared about this movie?  The witch stuff is kind of cute, since it turns a lot of expectations on their heads, but mostly I found myself wondering how many of the designs and set pieces would have been at home in The Witcher 3 rather than give a crap about the characters.  But it's not godawful; just uninteresting.

A Rainy Day in New York - Man, what's worse than being set aside by the New York Glitterati, who used to eat up everything you did with a spoon?  You made a paean to their city, you made the most touching romantic comedy in your lifetime, and you collected bushels of awards for all sorts of people, but now they can't stand you, because of rumors and innuendos and hearsay and he-said-she-said blah-blah that just exists to tear down everything you worked your whole life to build.  You know what would really set them straight?  Make a movie *about* all those insufferable, fairweather people!  Make a movie with a main character named GATSBY WELLES who does nothing but speak in the same whiny, overwrought, self-indulgent manner as them; that'll really stick in their craw!  And what'll doubly stick in their craw is if that GATSBY WELLES guy is also (because you're such an adept writer!) a stand-in for yourself - the exact character who's appeared in so many of your movies, the character that used to earn Michael Caine Academy Awards but that now the critics loathe!  Yeah, that'll show 'em!  And you'll pepper - nay, litter! - the film with a bunch of "famous" perverts who drool all over one of the female leads, because hey, there are loads of guys in the movie industry who do that!  You wanna call people out, let's call 'em out, baby!  We're on board the calling-out train today!  But then, you make your movie, with all the newest and brightest stars, exactly the way you want it, and no one cares.  No one really notices.  No one sees all your sly criticism, no one gets that you're in on the joke, because it's just all a big joke, and why isn't anyone else laughing?

I ask you, truly, what could be worse than that?

Oh, right, being a fucking pedophile; that's worse.

(This only gets Acceptable because Elle Fanning, that little Chalamet bastard, and Selena Gomez drag it to some level of quality; maybe they can go do something together that's not in service of a kid-toucher).

Dan in Real Life - This might have been the movie I enjoyed the most out of this batch, but man am I tired of Steve Carell right now.  Juliette Binoche really makes this work, though, as you are just absolutely convinced from Moment One that her and Carell's character are perfect for each other, and that's mostly on her for playing off him so well.  Plus, stealing from Dane Cook is delicious irony.  I wonder if anyone else got a sizable chuckle out of the "All his best lines are yours" bit of dialogue.  The structure of this works well, with all the ways in which they have to dance around to eventually get to the conclusion, but it's also the kind of movie that's 100% telegraphed from the start.  There are no real surprises.  But sometimes that works, and it mostly works here.

City on Fire - I know they say this is where Tarantino got the idea for Reservoir Dogs, but you know how I know that's not true?  There aren't enough foot shots!  OK, there is some surprising armpit hair, though, so maybe this bled into Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.  But this is as much different from its spiritual successor as Infernal Affairs is from The Departed, maybe more so.  Tarantino had the good sense to focus the camera where it belonged, on the real tensions of the story.  This, on the other hand, is pretty blatantly 80s in a lot of not-so-good ways, and it ends up oddly focused on some kind of bizarro-world buddy-criminal bit that just doesn't work well, given that one of the characters involved doesn't speak for literally half the film and mostly shoots people in the bits where he's silent.  Chow Yun Fat is...well, he's awesome, because hey, when is he not, but this often feels overcooked and needlessly complicated, unless the point of the movie was to criticize Hong Kong police for being pathologically incompetent.  It's an interesting peek into the past, but it's got nothing on similar stuff by superior filmmakers (thinking mostly of Hard-Boiled and Police Story).

You're Not You - Hilary Swank playing someone with a serious illness: this is just straight Oscar bait, right?  Well, yeah, mostly, but she's not why this is worth watching (she's very good, though).  Emmy Rossum, on the other hand, is.  Easily the best performance I've seen from her.  Granted, I've seen maybe 10 minutes of Shameless and couldn't think of a prestige TV show I wanted to watch less than that, so I went in thinking that her character was just going to be a retread of whatever I assume she did on the show.  It probably starts out that way (watch for yourself and decide), but man does this get real in a hurry, and it's up to her to play off of Swank's character as well as she does to make this ring true.   They have a great chemistry together, and what could have been something maudlin or hollow ends up legitimately touching.  A lot of the side characters work well, and even walking charisma sink Josh Duhamel can't ruin this.  Really close to being an Awesome pick, except that it's all acting and script; there's nothing at all remarkable from a visual standpoint.

Edited by Contentious C
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The screening of Dan in Real Life my wife and I attended is part of our shorthand of in-jokes. Towards the end of the movie when Carrell and Binoche are having a heart to heart, this intense voice from a few seats down from us breathlessly shouted, “Kiss her!”

One of us says it at least once a month. 

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When I was watching Star Wars: Rogue One, at the bit where Jimmy Smits says "I must return to Alderaan", someone in the cinema screamed "NO!". Like mate, it's a prequel. Bail Organa died in the destruction of Alderaan in 1977. You can't save him 40 years later.

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On 12/11/2021 at 11:54 AM, Curt McGirt said:

He was fine in Spun and actually in that Dawn of the Dead remake too. That's about it. 

Leguizamo chews on scenery in Spawn and is the only thing worth watching in that movie.   His small role as Aurelio in John Wick pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the movie as he puts over Wick's badassery in like five minutes.

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So.  Nightmare Alley is based on the 1940-ish novel of the same name by William Lindsay Gresham, and is a sister adaptation to the 1947 film starring Tyrone Power.

I totally forgot that I read the novel in high school as most 804 public school kids were forced at gunpoint to pick literature from regional authors for our book reports.  Pro wrestling enthusiasts will probably enjoy this more than others since they will identify with the carny trappings and the themes surrounding the seedy elements of show business.

If the new re-imaging is as good as the novel, then it should be very thought provoking indeed.

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Well, I mean, it's The Banana Boat Song; seems like a natural fit for a movie called "Calypso Heat Wave". 

Plus, Alan Arkin!?!?! I mean, that could be your connection right there; maybe he was trying to break into acting (or was still small-time) and was also in the band.  But him, singing in a band?  That's like Bernie Sanders having fronted the Beatles on their U.S. tours or something (not so much in popularity but in wrong-voicedness). 

Great, now I have, "Let me just say this / I would like to hold your hand" in my head, because those are the weird places my brain goes.  FML.

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As far as I know, I never knew about his folks singing career. He and Adam were on Gilbert’s podcast, where I heard the story. And then funny part about the whole story is the rivalry with Harry Belafonte over the song, which included a lawsuit. 

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Hey, 5 months straight!  It's movies movies movies movies, and nobody gives a crap!  Day 159 of Whatever This Thing Is, Friendly Neighborhood Movie Critic Edition...

Hot Garbage

Twilight - No, not that one, although that's also hot garbage.  This is the 1998 film with Paul Newman, Gene Hackman, and Susan Sarandon.  I don't know why it's called "Twilight", unless they wanted to presage that anything with such a name would suck.  This has an absolute crapload of before-they-were-stars roles in addition to the Oscar winners (squint and you'll see Jason Clarke in there, even).  And somehow it's still a tepid-at-best, phoned-in, uninteresting yawnfest of an attempted noir movie.  This movie is only any good if you're kind of a pervert, and only for the first three minutes, when a rather young Reese Witherspoon gets surprisingly naked (though why she and Sarandon bothered, I can't tell you).  There's nothing else about it that you haven't seen a thousand times or isn't done substantially better elsewhere.  Films like this apparently exist just to cut down the Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf - I guess it's...cute? That the TV series leans so hard on this pile of dung as backstory, but it isn't actually much good.  Witchers doing weeaboo anime bullshit trampoline jumps to cut down foes?  Yeah, no.  Just take that and shove it back up whoever's asshole it came out of, thank you very little.  Thinking of Vesemir as a smarmy cardboard cutout of a pirate is not really in keeping with the spirit of the character, either.  Or maybe I'm just done with anime.  Maybe - crazy thought, I know - just MAYBE the world is ready for a different kind of art style for this type of stuff.  Maybe it all doesn't have to look the fucking same.  Maybe someone could, I don't know, be creative.  But hey, there are weird elf monster boobs and big Akira-style blood gouts, so I'm sure this some adult virgin's favorite film.  I hope I've offended him.

Red Notice - The second-nicest thing I can say about this movie is I lifted that "adult virgin" line from it.  The nicest thing I can say is the first big stunt scene is actually pretty well-done.  And...that's a wrap.  This is as flat and empty as a training bra.  Rock & Ryan Reynolds are just doing R&RR things - can we have a movie with them, Kat Dennings, and Awkwafina where no one actually acts and they all just do their schtick, so the entire production can all be hit by a meteor and wiped out?  Can that be my Christmas present?  I'm willing to forego any and all Deadpool sequels for that.  This is another one of those "How much did Netflix contribute to the global carbon footprint" sort of movies, and they'll probably make more of them.  Thanks, capitalism.

Acceptable

21 Jump Street - See, if you're going to do big, dumb cheeseball entertainment, THIS is what you do.  You'd think the director of Dodgeball would have known that.  The first 30 minutes or so of this are kind of the highlight, but there's just enough actual heart to the plot that you can kind of see it through until it gets back to being utterly ridiculous with cameos and explosions.  This is right there with Jolt from a couple of months ago in the pantheon of Dumb Fucking Movies I Will Probably Watch Again if Asked.  You know they're bad, just like the double Whopper with bacon you just bought, but they get snarfed down all the same. 

The Girl with All the Gifts - OK, we can be done with zombie stuff now.  A respectable enough movie where zombies stand for Millennials raging against late-stage capitalism?  That means we're officially out of zombie ideas.  It's fine.  Although there's some fun and appropriately creepy stuff here, this still feels nearly entirely lifted from every other genre movie that preceded it, down to the grungy military bunkers, the condemned schoolhouses, and the overgrowth.  Maybe they just stuff those sets in a silo somewhere and trot them out for the next one?  We should play some kind of fucked-up "Where's Waldo?" when they do a The Last of Us movie, if so.  Also, please don't do a The Last of Us movie; see above, re: no more zombie movies.

A Date for Mad Mary - This was tonight's viewing and awfully, awfully close to an Awesome.  It only fails to make that cut because, much like You're Not You, you've seen every single bit of structure and camera work in this movie in every other indie film for the last 10 years; you know exactly what's going to happen based off of when the music rises or when the dialogue fades out and we're left with pantomime scenes.  But it's also highly similar to Girlhood, in that that it's almost an answer (though it's not; it's based on an earlier play), a maturing of that movie.  This is where things go when the crazy teenage girl doesn't actually grow up and life hits her like a ton of bricks for a while.  Seana Kerslake is great in this, and it's pretty much her show, but all the side characters play off her well, and the resolution to all their screwed-up friendships is satisfying.

High Fidelity && - Obviously a rewatch, but one that has not held up too well.  I tend to agree with @jdw that the worst thing about this movie is Iben Hjejle as Laura, because clearly they did not learn a fucking thing from David Mamet - i.e., don't cast the main star and/or director's girlfriend as a favor.  On this rewatch especially, I found myself wondering how much better it would have been if they had swapped her for Penny and had Joelle Carter be Laura instead. 

And that leads me to so much of what else didn't work.  I was never comfortable with the Penny scene, and I'm even less comfortable with how it plays now.  What's more glaringly obvious to me than it ever was before is how thoroughly unlikable these people are.  It isn't just Charlie; it isn't just Tim Robbins' scummy weirdo.  It's everyone aside from maybe Dick.  Rob is every bit as much of an asshole as the people he criticizes, but then again he tells us that straight out of the gate with his, "I'd feel bad if I wasn't one of them" speech.  When I was 21, I thought I wanted to be like Rob and couldn't admit I was 1000000% Barry.  Double the time, and now I wouldn't want to be either of them.  I guess I just grew out of thinking there was anything charming or worthwhile about being a self-loathing, broody, insecure whiner, and I'm not sure he deserves a happy ending anyway. 

Soundtrack's still a banger, though.

Awesome

Spider-Man: No Way Home - Easily the most pleasantly fan-service-heavy movie I've ever seen.  I think I said enough in the spoiler thread that I don't feel like elaborating further here.  Besides, you've probably seen it by now yourself.

Brief Encounter - It's possible I could have knocked this down a notch for the things I dislike in other films (the antiquated acting, the narration telling us every detail that the action could tell us instead), but this is a case where influence wins out.  It's a pretty direct beeline to one of my favorite movies ever - In the Mood for Love - so I can't fault this too much for being a relic of the '40s.  The best parts of it are still really strong and well-directed, and that opening scene is just an all-time great, where literally nothing is said to tell you anything, but everything is obvious anyway.  Hardly the best entry for this type of film, and hardly David Lean's best film, but still a worthy entry on both counts.

What If - Not what I was expecting to land so high on my watchlist.  But I don't think I've laughed this hard at a movie in a very long time.  This leans hard on humor that's self-deprecating, relentlessly dark, and always goes three steps too far, but that's the kind of stuff I love, so it's like it was written for me.  Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan just have fucking oodles of charisma with each other.  There's a school of thought that good drama is when something happens on the screen and you want to scream at them, "No, you total knobs, do the exact opposite!  Do the thing that is totally obvious to me!"; and the two of them nail that over and over and over throughout the film.  This also has Adam Driver pre-the entire world turning into the Adam Driver Appreciation Society, but he's as good here as he is in anything else, and he and Mackenzie Davis are great foils for the leads.  Probably would have snuck onto the very, very end of my 2010s top 100.

Winner Winner, Chekhov Dinner

Drive My Car - Ryusuke Hamaguchi~!~!~!  This fucking guy just keeps doing it.  I haven't read the Haruki Murakami stories this is based off of - the titular story and "Sheherazhad" - but that's because Haruki Murakami is a seriously acquired taste.  I read Norwegian Wood and just left that...confused.  I wondered if it was the translation but my now-ex told me, "No, that's just how he is, apparently."  But this film contextualizes so much about what I was probably feeling then: the sense of isolation, of feeling like you're living alone with your burdens in the world, of thinking your problems are somehow unique when they aren't. 

All of the characters in this are living that way to varying degrees, while putting on a Chekhov play where the actors are from various parts of the world and deliver their lines in their native languages, trying to find a way to connect with each other and emote to the audience through a Tower of Babel of their own choosing.  Sounds pretentious as fuck, right?  Well, it might come off that way if the acting weren't so immaculate, as seems to always be the case with Hamaguchi's films.  Hidetoshi Nishijima linchpins the whole thing, but he gets some major assists from Reika Kirishima, who plays his wife, and especially Yoo-rim Park, who plays one of the critical roles of Uncle Vanya as a mute woman using Korean Sign Language.  Toko Miura plays Misaki, his taciturn driver, and she might be the weakest of the main characters, but she's still excellent; it's more like saying you prefer strawberry to chocolate ice cream by saying the others are better.  Oh, and it's also beautifully shot, as I don't think there's a single boring or merely functional frame in the entire film.  It's a little weird to see a happy ending in one of his movies - the other two being quite ambiguous - but it's still open-ended in the right sorts of ways, leaving you to fill in the blanks.  The decade may be young, and it's certainly trying to murder us all to death before we reach the end, but this is easily my current Movie of the 2020s pick. 

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2 hours ago, Contentious C said:

OK, we can be done with zombie stuff now.

This is the exact thought I had after seeing not only World War Z (because I hate hate hated it) but also The Dead Don't Die. Girl was good, but I'm so over it. And Night of the Living Dead is my favorite movie. 

I was watching The Movies (the CNN/Tom Hanks miniseries) '80s episode and was struck by how John Cusack ended up playing what is versions of the same lead in Say Anything, Grosse Point Blank and High Fidelity. That's some quality typecasting. Oh and BTW, did you know Cusack is like a seventh-degree black belt in kickboxing?

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Yeah, that was one of the few things that was actually funnier to me this time watching High Fidelity than in the past; it was clear Stephen Frears was doing some quality piss-taking by doing bizarro-world versions of the ghetto blaster scene.  Out in the rain and shouting, out in the rain on a pay phone, out in the rain being a creep...

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17 hours ago, Contentious C said:

What If - Not what I was expecting to land so high on my watchlist.  But I don't think I've laughed this hard at a movie in a very long time. 

I watched this as basically part of a Zoe Kazan double feature after The Big Sick. I love it when Driver does comedy.

 

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Yeah, she was pretty damn good in both.  I thought about talking about The Big Sick but thought it would detract, so I'll say what I was going to say in this space: I liked What If quite a bit better, because how do you have a movie where a guy plays himself and yet he's the worst part of the movie by far?  But they're both still rewatchable.

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On 12/7/2021 at 3:33 PM, Eivion said:

I actually rewatched the first two movies before catching Afterlife. I always thought it was just the cartoon, but Janine was totally into Egon during the first movie. I enjoyed her and Louis together, but it was fun seeing her drops hints with Egon either not picking up on any of it or semi ignoring because he is so science focused. Egon was the only one of the doctors who didn't annoy the shit out of her.

Honestly it makes me even more curious to see who did marry the man.

She was still into Egon at the very end of Ghostbusters, but Ghostbusters 2 and the mountain of coke Dan Aykroyd did, coupled with the laissez faire attitudes of, well, literally everyone else lead to a movie that had to piggyback on whatever the Real Ghostbusters animated movie was doing where Janine was suddenly into Lewis when he character from the first movie would have told him to fuck off.

Other things we can "thank" the studio for shoehorning into 2 from the animated series: Pink slime, none of the characters smoke, different uniforms (the dark gray ones) with no explanation so they can make more toys, a bit more Slimer, and a bunch more things I'm forgetting. 

It's one of those things that I shouldn't allow to bug me, but it seriously annoys me whenever Dan Aykroyd speaks highly of Ghostbusters 2. That movie is a mountain of shit that no one, but Dan, wanted anything to do with.

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