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2022 Movies Discussion Thread (v.2.0)


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25 minutes ago, J.T. said:

I really enjoyed the extended versions but all three in one shot is like nine fucking hours.  I definitely wouldn't recommend a marathon.

Nine hours doesn't even cover the theatrical versions. In for a penny in for a pound: do extended versions. A better title for the movies is complete(extended) and abridged(theatrical).

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52 minutes ago, Dolfan in NYC said:

Peter Jackson doesn't get enough grief for his mastrubatory love for Tolkien and the insane length of those movies.  

Stick with the regular ones, they're fine.  

I never watched the concluding film to the Hobbit trilogy because I found Smaug utterly unwatchable, and I didn't overly care for Part 1 in the theaters. 

Also, Tolkien's masturbatory love of all things lengthy isn't just contained to Tolkien. His shortest film in 20 years is Lovely Bones which runs a little over 2:10.

Kong was 3+ hours, and I loved the Beatles thing a couple months ago, but that approaches 9 hours itself. 

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If only there were an extended version of Meet the Feebles...

Anyway, I've got the extended Fellowship and recall enjoying it, don't have a disc of the middle one (yes, I'm actually spacing on the name and will leave that in), Return only have the regular version. Pretty sure I've seen the extended Return but not the extended... other one. (*Googles* TWO TOWERS! That's it. Stephen Colbert would be so disappointed. Maybe he'd be okay after I told him my favorite Tolkien is The Silmarillion.) Extended Return, IIRC, was almost too much to eat in one sitting itself. 

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All of the LOTR and Hobbit movies are lovely-looking trash.  They're not Transformers-level trash, but they're still nothingburgers I wouldn't rewatch unless someone paid me for the time (which is about $40/hr, btw).  Yay, contributions!

Piggybacking off of New Blood's last post in the 2021 thread (though I was already thinking of it myself), here were my Top Movies Watched for the First Time in 2021 (no particular order):

  • Secrets & Lies
  • Videodrome
  • Repo Man
  • Funny Games (1997)
  • Drive My Car
  • His Girl Friday
  • Come and See

There were a lot of other great ones, but nothing that *quite* rose to the level of these.

And now, Best 2021 Movies I saw (a much shorter list):

  1. Drive My Car
  2. The Power of the Dog *gap*
  3. The Last Duel *even bigger gap*
  4. Dune
  5. Everything else

I liked Spider-Man, but no way it has any business being nominated for Best Picture.

Now, more movies!  You don't care!  You've got bigger things to worry about today!  Don't we all!  Day 177 of...this junk, Shitty Anniversaries Edition.

Hot Garbage

Carrie Pilby - I just got done watching this crud on Netflix and I really want that 98 minutes back.  This is maybe a step above a Lifetime movie with more swearing and more British people, but otherwise there's just nothing redeeming about it.  The characters are boring, the script is lifeless, the acting is shoddy (though Gabriel Byrne could literally sleepwalk through something like this and not be awful, and perhaps he did just that).  There's maybe one scene early on that has some zip to it, and that kind of gets your hopes up, and then the rest is just dull.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon - The Transformers franchise is so uniformly awful and unremarkable that I couldn't recall if I'd seen this.  Turns out I hadn't, so hey, here it is stinking up this list.  I seriously couldn't tell you a thing about the plot of either of the previous movies, except, "They arrive" and "John Turturro is doing his best John Leguizamo impression and annoying the piss out of me every time he appears."  This movie is at least slightly better than that, because you do finally get a sense of the stakes involved, as we see the wholesale slaughter of an entire city at the hands of batshit-crazy aliens.  I'm not sure this has a single thing else going for it, except that Michael Bay, as ever, can make pretty things out of $200 million in straight garbage.  It's a weird thing to be good at, but...here we are.  This also feels just hyper-violent - I mean, the whole thing is blowing up cities and terrorizing people, but we don't give PG-13 ratings to movies where people violent rip the heads off of animals, for example.  And yet, here are some car-robot-mechs that we try to anthropomorphize so we care about them, but they get to experience what are clearly agonizing, brutal, and undignified deaths and that's OK because their blood is, what, oil?  What the actual fuck.

Last Action Hero && - I actually don't know if I'd ever seen this all the way through before.  I probably did, but it made no impression on me 20+ years ago when I must have seen it.  It's...a huge pile of crap, but at least it's got a little of that Hudson Hawk vibe of knowing it's a huge pile of crap.  But this most assuredly does not fall into the "so bad it's good" category.  It's just bad.  The CGI is awful, even for 1993; the kid is Every Annoying Kid You Shouldn't Cast in Your Movie; and it might be Shane Black's single worst script.  I do appreciate all the self-aware nods throughout, and that Arnold & McTiernan were willing to go that far in breaking the fourth wall, but being different is hardly the same as being well-done.

Daddy's Home - Hey, Linda Cardellini is in this.  We're literally done listing the things that make it tolerable.  If you piled up all the DVDs and Blu-rays of the shitty movies Will Ferrell & Mark Wahlberg have done, how many children do you think you could suffocate under that pile?  I'm thinking it's well into the thousands.  That thought experiment has more value to society than this movie ever did.  No.  Just no.   Still not as bad as The Crow: Wicked Prayer, though.

Ava - I thought about putting this in Acceptable, as the cast is not terrible, but the only genre more inherently awful right now is the zombie movie.  Spy/assassin thrillers are gaining ground quick, though, as John Wick injected some unfortunate life into grim corpses like this (and then of course shat out a decent sequel and kind of a grim corpse of its own).  Oh, oh wait, your movie is about a spy who murders people to death who is now trying to avoid being murdered to death for all their murdering?  And it's their own agency who wants them dead?  No, I didn't already see that a billion times, you Jason Bourne fetishist, you.  And this has the nerve to try to pretend it's not exactly like every other movie in the genre by barfing up some crap about a bad home life and alcoholism and stuff, but it falls totally flat.  Fuck right off with this.

Acceptable

Gunpowder Milkshake - This is another movie that owes a huge debt to John Wick, but it's far, far, far more Kill Bill than Bourne Identity.  It's not the least bit self-serious, it's got a few really good stunt pieces, and the cast goes pretty well together.  I do wonder why Angela Bassett has insisted on turning herself into a plastic surgery nightmare, but that's not really anything to do with the movie.  It's far from great and it does feel like it fizzles out a bit, as the first third or so is funnier and more ridiculous than the rest, but it works well enough.  It would be nice to see Karen Gillan do some, I don't know, acting, though.

The Half of It - This was a surprisingly charming little movie; it's basically Cyrano de Bergerac if it were Queer-ano de Bergerac, and if the dumb guy who thinks he loves Roxanne also caught feelings for Cyrano.  I think the whole bit with the main character's dad dragged down the movie every time he appeared, not to mention his character felt cheaply stereotypical at its best.  But, it seemed pretty clear that the writer/director lived this herself and probably stayed true to her memories, rather than flesh out some of the characters - or caricatures - she drew.  But the 3 main actors are all really, really good together and win you over despite their characters' near-constant ability to fuck up everything they touch.

The Night Before - I think a lot of people could view this as deserving the Hot Garbage category, and it is yet another slapdash Seth Rogen/Jonathan Levine collaboration, but it's the rare time where Rogen doing the "guy who's too high all the time" schtick actually works, because his character is otherwise such a stick in the mud that his freakouts are relatively believable.  Plus, he just has a good vibe with JGL and Anthony Mackie, so the movie rolls along at a nice clip without getting too far away from the laughs.  Weirdly, though, some of the funniest bits - and basically all of the heartfelt bits - come from their interactions with their wives/exes/mothers, so you almost wish this weren't so over-the-top and spent more time on some of those relationships.  Otherwise, this felt a tiny bit like What If, with respect to the humor always going three steps too far, but is otherwise a very simple, but enjoyable, adult Christmas movie.  May have to watch it next year for the holidays.

Shoot the Piano Player - I just don't think I like French New Wave, is what it is.  I like about half of one Godard movie, and the rest of his catalog I've seen, I could flush.  I didn't hate The 400 Blows or anything, but about the nicest thing I could say about Truffaut's movies thus far is that I don't loathe them as much as Godard.  I really enjoyed the first 10 minutes or so of this, when it felt a little jaunty and weird and populated with outlandish characters, but I swear, the second some criminal or noirish type out of one of these has to open his mouth to share his big idea about society, or women, or human nature, or blah blah fuckity blah, I want to be the guy who ventilates his head with a handgun, instead of waiting for the inevitable scene where said pontificating blowhard criminal does it to someone else to bring it all home how the protagonist can't escape his past.

Fury - AKA, Saving Private Ryan for tank fetishists.  Out of this batch of movies, this might have had the best cast and some of the best performances, as Jon Bernthal is, to no one's great surprise, a massive creepjob, and this might be one of Brad Pitt's best 3 or 4 roles, too.  The middle of the film has a surprisingly tender moment that is of course ruined by the horrors of war in multiple ways, but there are times where this feels hamfisted, especially when it comes to the score, which tends to step on some of the film (including said middle).  But this adds very little new to what a bunch of other directors have already done for WWII films, although it might be worth it just because it takes some of the shine off of the likes of Patton.

Awesome

To Sleep with Anger - Ooof, now this is a disturbing film.  Easily, easily the best thing I've ever seen Danny Glover do, almost to the point that you can't believe he did this in the middle of shitting out Lethal Weapon movies every 2.5 years.  What's great about this is the ambiguity; you can read this as a parable of sorts, or you can read it as just a realistic portrayal of dysfunction.  The hints are there for both, and whether you want to think Harry is actually evil, or that Gideon & Suzie's family was always headed for disaster and they have no one to blame but themselves, you're right either way.  Mary Alice and Sheryl Lee Ralph are both great in this; it's probably the best thing I've seen either of them do, although that isn't saying much given how little of Mary Alice I've seen as anything other than someone's doddering grandmother.  If I were making a Best of the 90s list - who the fuck am I kidding? Of course I am - this would be a shoo-in for that.

Edited by Contentious C
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I had to watch a lot of French New Wave for a grad school class on French film. I ended up preferring Melville’s stuff to the younger guys, but I do like Piano Player, maybe because it was referenced in a bunch of other films. 

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11 hours ago, Contentious C said:

Hot Garbage

Last Action Hero && - I actually don't know if I'd ever seen this all the way through before.  I probably did, but it made no impression on me 20+ years ago when I must have seen it.  It's...a huge pile of crap, but at least it's got a little of that Hudson Hawk vibe of knowing it's a huge pile of crap.  But this most assuredly does not fall into the "so bad it's good" category.  It's just bad.  The CGI is awful, even for 1993; the kid is Every Annoying Kid You Shouldn't Cast in Your Movie; and it might be Shane Black's single worst script.  I do appreciate all the self-aware nods throughout, and that Arnold & McTiernan were willing to go that far in breaking the fourth wall, but being different is hardly the same as being well-done.

Sooooo getting banned.

Edited by J.T.
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TOP FIRST TIME WATCHES IN 2021 (feature films only, based on Letterboxd rating)

***** - Orlando (Potter, 1992)

****1/2 - The French Dispatch (Anderson, 2021), Raw (Ducournau, 2016), The Mitchells vs. The Machines (Rianda, 2021), Spider-Man: No Way Home (Watts, 2021)

 

BOTTOM FIRST TIME WATCHES IN 2021 (feature films only, based on Letterboxd rating)

1/2* - Cremaster 1 (Barney, 1996), Scary Movie 5 (Lee, 2013)

* - Scary Movie 4 (Zucker, 2006), Spice World (Spiers, 1997), Hard Kill (Eskandari, 2020), Vita & Virginia (Button, 2018), Honor & Glory (Ho, 1993), Emanuelle, Queen of the Desert (Fontana, 1982), Racquet (Winters, 1979), Laser Mission (Davis, 1989)

Edited by Swift
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5 hours ago, Swift said:

 

* - Scary Movie 4 (Zucker, 2006), Spice World (Spiers, 1997), Hard Kill (Eskandari, 2020), Vita & Virginia (Button, 2018), Honor & Glory (Ho, 1993), Emanuelle, Queen of the Desert (Fontana, 1982), Racquet (Winters, 1979), Laser Mission (Davis, 1989)

This saddens me. Is it good? Not in a technical sensr. Do I have a fun time every time I watch Spice World? Oh yes.

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I was a pop music fan and liked the Spice Girls in 1997 so if I'd watched it then I'd probably really have enjoyed it. I went into this viewing thinking I'd enjoy it too, at least for the various Brit cameos if nothing else, but unfortunately there was very little redeemable about the whole affair.

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On 1/5/2022 at 10:45 AM, Dolfan in NYC said:

Peter Jackson doesn't get enough grief for his mastrubatory love for Tolkien and the insane length of those movies.  

Stick with the regular ones, they're fine.  

Peter Jackson should get grief for his insufficient love for Tolkien. Or at least for his lack of understanding of the book.

And Lawful, you should of course be confirming that your kids remember the book well before worrying about the movies. Priorities!

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21 hours ago, Dolfan in NYC said:

Well this is good news:

 

Was wondering when we would hear about this. Felt like something had to have been worked out to a degree already when they announced the next Predator movie.

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19 hours ago, hammerva said:

So I was watching Youtube and apparently the Foo Fighters are doing some kind of horror/comedy movie in February.    That doesn't sound like a good career path for them

Yep, I got it in my feed this morning.  Just posted the trailer for Studio 666 in the Horror thread.

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Just watched Prisoners of the Ghostland. Holy shit. As insane as the trailer makes it look, way better than it has any right to be and probably Cage's best performance(sans all irony) in a very long time.

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THE LAST DUEL is on HBO MAX now.  It is

A) freaking great.

B) a weird choice for a flashpoint in the Internet discourse regarding the death of cinema at the hands of superheroes and millennials. This is not GLADIATOR. There is very little action in the film, aside from the titular duel, and what little there is is explicitly depicted as being mostly pointless. The runtime of the film is largely devoted to pasty guys with bad hair squabbling over property rights and titles. Oh, and it’s about a rape. This film wouldn’t have packed audiences into theaters 10 or even 20 years ago.

C) a real shame that we’re probably not many years away from losing 84-year old Ridley Scott as an active director, one of the few  left with enough juice to get somebody to plunk down $100+ million on adult stories like this.

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@Contentious C forgive me, as i'm sure you've covered this before, but why exactly are you watching all of these movies? and how are you choosing what to watch? You clearly have your preferences but i can't see any unifying themes, tones, actors, directors, genres, acclaim, or anything to group your film choices.

also, unrelated to your mad quest to watch every movie ever or whatever, i loved and continue to love Last Action Hero. Fully in the "so bad it's good" category for me.

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