Movies 2022 Movies Discussion Thread (v.2.0)

[(BP)]

15 minutes ago, Control said:

Apropos of nothing, but I think it’s possible WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? is actually underrated.

I just listened to the episode of the Blank Check podcast on Roger Rabbit, and they speculate about why it’s fallen out of the popular consciousness when it was universally loved at the time.

One of the interesting things they suggested was that it was made just before Disney’s animation renaissance beginning the following year with The Little Mermaid, and they weren’t going to do something that risky and costly again. They just decided to not be in the Roger business beyond those shorts in the early 90s. They also pointed out that a lot of the references and characters fly over kids heads now because vintage cartoons that had been syndicated for decades were phased out and replaced with newer content starting in the 90s. 

[odessasteps]

It's also odd now to see that kind of cooperation between studios. Like how we ko longer get an DC/Marvel comics (other than a reprint book for George Perez). 

[Control]

It has a genuinely good film noir plot, like it’s the unofficial third CHINATOWN film. But more to the point, no one has ever acted opposite animation as well as Bob Hoskins does in this film, and he was basically in uncharted territory at the time.

[piranesi]

4 minutes ago, Control said:

It has a genuinely good film noir plot, like it’s the unofficial third CHINATOWN film. But more to the point, no one has ever acted opposite animation as well as Bob Hoskins does in this film, and he was basically in uncharted territory at the time.

I demand that the fourth Chinatown movie be called The Two Jessicas.

 

[Johnny Sorrow]

I saw Who Framed Roger Rabbit in the theater twice in 1988 my Senior year of HS and after the second viewing my date and I went back to my place and I got lucky.

So, it's obviously one of my favorite movies, and I don't think you need to get all the cartoon drops to enjoy it. It's a GREAT movie.

[John from Cincinnati]

6 hours ago, (BP) said:

I just listened to the episode of the Blank Check podcast on Roger Rabbit, and they speculate about why it’s fallen out of the popular consciousness when it was universally loved at the time.

Nice to see another Blankie! Have you been taking part in their March Madness this year?

[(BP)]

5 hours ago, John from Cincinnati said:

Nice to see another Blankie! Have you been taking part in their March Madness this year?

I just got into the show in the past month, but it’s been on my agenda for years after hearing them on crossover episodes with other shows. I’ll have to wait until next year for March Madness. If there are any specific miniseries or episodes that you’d recommend I’d appreciate it. 

[Coletti]

Blank Check reviewing one of my favorite movies ever with the Doughboys? Quality podcasting right there!

[Kuetsar]

I remember the judge doom reveal scared the crap out of me at the time. Then again i would have been around 8 years old.

[John from Cincinnati]

8 hours ago, (BP) said:

I just got into the show in the past month, but it’s been on my agenda for years after hearing them on crossover episodes with other shows. I’ll have to wait until next year for March Madness. If there are any specific miniseries or episodes that you’d recommend I’d appreciate it. 

Not sure about specifics I'd recommend, but you're in a pretty good spot with the Zemeckis miniseries. Interesting arc to him. Astounding commercial and critical highs, a Best Picture winner that's reviled in some circles, somewhat forgotten to culture pictures like What Lies Beneath that you can't imagine cracking top ten for the year at the box office nowadays, the weird uncanny valley stuff, the anticipation of Griffin eventually making his case for Allied, JD coming in late into the series to make his case for what works in The Walk, a disappointing finale in The Witches where nobody really wants to talk about the movie, etc. There's a lot of meat on the bone there and it presents a lot of different flavours of the show. Only thing really missing is an absolute dunkfest episode, like talking JGL on the Don Jon ep or talking Chevy in Memoirs of an Invisible Man. 

One thing I've been loving about the show the last couple years is they're comfortable enough with where their listenership is and how consistent it is that they leave some obvious choices for a miniseries untouched and cover an Elaine May or a Gina Prince-Bythewood. Gives the show some good variety. 

Edited March 27, 2022 by John from Cincinnati

[Technico Support]

Anybody watch that new Rocky 4 yet?  Maybe @Craig H?  I forgot it existed but stumbled upon it this weekend.  I'm kind of ambivalent about it.  Stallone removed a lot of the "of its time" stuff from it (some of the over the top jingoism, the robot, etc.) and added more charcter and humanistic stuff, I guess.  It's definitely more of a tribute to Apollo and Duke, and the fights are reedited to make them slightly less unrealistic and bombastic, so I guess it's fine.  In the end, I didn't feel like it was better or worse than the original, just different.  Stolen from a reddit thread, here's a good list of some of the differences:

• No exploding gloves at the beginning

• No Rocky v Apollo sparring in the beginning

• Extends Rocky III recap instead

• No Paulie bday party (!). No robot at all (!!!)

• No anniversary cake in bed with Adrian

• No car wash scene

• No steroid question and Popeye joke during training session

• "A normal heavyweight averages 700 pounds of pressure per square inch" is missing. Instead, they just show Drago hitting 1850 psi without context.

• Adds yard talk between Rocky and Apollo

• Adds kitchen scene with Rocky and Adrian

• No robot interrupting dinner talk

• Cut "regular people" line when Rocky and Apollo are watching old fight

• No dressing room scene before Apollo fight

• Cut ominous music before Apollo fight

• No greeting between fighters' wives before Apollo fight 

• Rocky isn't announced before Apollo fight

• Moved Drago's wife smoking to before the fight instead of after round 1

• Added more to convo between Rocky and Apollo between rounds

• Added Duke's speech at funeral, longer Rocky speech, talk with Adrian

• Adds meeting with boxing officials who say Rocky can't fight Drago

• No Drago's wife speech at press conference

• Adds Drago trying to talk at presser (This was actually funny - a reporter asks Drago if he can talk and he just says, "Yes.")

• "He's gonna have to kill me" speech moved from staircase talk with Adrian to cabin with Duke 

• Added stupid earmuffs joke between Rocky and Paulie in Russia

• No kids watching fight from home ("What do you think we are, nerds?")

• No "knock him out" speech from Duke before round 15

• Adds ref warning to Rocky's corner before 15th

• Different KO, no real count in new version. In original movie, Drago tries to get up, falls through ropes after about an 8 count

• Different celebration, jumps into Duke's arms

• Extended celebration, Rocky taps gloves with Drago after his speech

Edited March 28, 2022 by Technico Support

[Mister TV]

I enjoyed the re-cut of Rocky IV, of the "directors re-cutting their movie years later" list this was the best.

[Craig H]

I still have yet to see it, but Duke is probably my favorite secondary character by far. I probably like him more than Apollo to be honest. I'm not sure how I feel about Stallone cutting Duke's speech before round 15, but if the rest puts more emphasis on Apollo and Duke then I'll probably be happy with it.

[Log]

On 3/27/2022 at 7:03 AM, (BP) said:

I just got into the show in the past month, but it’s been on my agenda for years after hearing them on crossover episodes with other shows. I’ll have to wait until next year for March Madness. If there are any specific miniseries or episodes that you’d recommend I’d appreciate it. 

Their episode on the original Halloween is really interesting.  That's the only one I've listened to, but it's made me want to check out more.

[Contentious C]

Hey, it's Monday; I wonder what movie-related things people are talking about today? Hmmm.  HMMMMMMMMM.  It's day 258 (and counting) of Some Crap I Do, Average McAverage & Sons Edition.

Hot Garbage

This Means War - Oh, Reese Witherspoon, here we are again.  How did this woman become a tastemaker for America when she has this taste in scripts?  Or do we just like our celebrities more when they demonstrate they're as clueless as we a---don't answer that.  Anyway, the stunts are generally bad, the ending is telegraphed a mile away as soon as Abigail Spencer shows up in the film and kind of feels like the wrong ending, a major plot point involves someone being tracked by a piece of fabric from a custom suit (like you couldn't just use aliases!  He's in the CI-fucking-A!), and there's more chemistry between Hardy & Pine than there is between either of them and Witherspoon.  Unlike Legally Bland, this I believe did not achieve its objective of making money, so nice flop you guys have there.  I feel bad for every guy who got dragged to a date on this.  I feel bad for the women (or men, or whoever else) dragged them there, for that matter.

Odd Thomas - I've been putting off watching this for a long, long time, because it's one of Anton Yelchin's last movies (maybe his last one), and I just *knew* there was no way a Dean Koontz adaptation was going to be any good.  Yelchin wasn't a great actor, but he could do well with decent material and occasionally make chicken salad out of chicken shit, such as the Fright Night remake.  But this...ugh.  Ugh ugh ugh.  If you are watching this just to leer at Addison Timlin, well...I can't actually fault you much for that, even though she's a terrible actress, because everything else about this is just as terrible as she is, so you have to get your interest where you can with this 90-minute turd.  The CGI, the script, the bad-Syfy-Channel-director way it all looks, it's one big disaster.  And yet somehow Willem Dafoe and Gugu Mbatha-Raw are both in this!  What in the holy sandwich fuck is this??  They're the only thing close to a highlight, but their ability to, y'know, ACT only contrasts the utter awfulness of the remainder of this enterprise.  If you had to take a shot every time there was Tedious Narration, you'd be dead inside of 10 minutes.  Just no. 

Paranoid Park - This has got to be Gus Van Sant's worst movie.  I almost couldn't believe it was him, except a lesser-known director probably wouldn't have been trusted to make something so confusing.  There are some decent uses of sound editing to drive home some of what's going on in the film, where the music choices just drown out or actively overwhelm, and you get the sense of what he's going for pretty well with those moments, but it might be the only thing that consistently works here.  And that one good thing feels all the more out of place because it just reminds you how much is missing otherwise: the actors aren't compelling, the script is basically non-existent, a lot of the dialogue that is relatively important is recorded at such a low volume you can miss it, and it plays around too much with your sense of time to give you enough of a reference point.  After a while, it dawns on you that some of the flashbacks and whatnot that happen only happen as they do because to tell the story in chronological order would be worse, and that's not a good enough reason to jumble up everything.  There's about 25% of a potentially very interesting movie here, dealing with some of the same things he's visited before, but I wonder what happened to the rest.

Acceptable

Death at a Funeral (2007) - I'm not sure why anyone has ever made a big deal about this, or had to feel particularly strongly about it compared to the remake (which, granted, I haven't seen).  They'd have to get a lot wrong with the second one to be appreciably worse than this, because this isn't actually very good at all for the first half.  All the jokes that truly land are in the last 30 minutes or so, and it's a bit of a long wind-up getting to those.  Some of the Alan Tudyk stuff is good, but it feels like it goes on too long relative to the other characters.  And Rupert Graves looks absolutely preposterous with Aging Guy Trying to Look Cool long hair.  I think its shortness hurts it a bit, too, as even though part of the point of the movie is the notion of "how well can you truly know anyone?", it still would have served us well to see a little more about *why* the people were all wrong about the man in question.  But, it's got its moments, and it's relatively well-done.  But that's kind of all it is.

Lions for Lambs - Oof.  Lots of famous people here, lots of smoke, not a lot of fire.  Unsurprisingly written by the same guy and released the same year as The Kingdom, because it's every bit as preachy.  It's a little terrifying to think that not a whole lot changed in 15 years, though, and the worst-case scenario is still kind of what we got out of our war-mongering.  I think the only sensible take I've ever read on stuff like this was in The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell, where he pointed out that people in other countries don't see us as some kind of beacon on a hill and don't want our ideas force-fed to them, and our unwillingness to face that will always fail us.  But this movie has maybe two or three compelling scenes and otherwise is a little too high-minded and heavy-handed to work.  It feels a lot like 90 minutes of preaching to the choir, and the not-so-subtle suggestion that we've been brain-drained by things like casualties in Vietnam and Iraq/Afghanistan isn't really borne out by the numbers.  We end up with the Josh Hawleys of the world because there are people just as awful as him who want to see that awfulness succeed.  You get the government you deserve, and this film misses that point badly, even if it's otherwise decently put together.

Deja Vu - I guess Tony Scott made one decent film a decade, and this was his 2000s entry.  It might be the rare occasion where his obsession with stunts and kinetic chaos worked in his favor, as unlike the Pelham remake, it keeps things moving here.  Hardly a great Denzel role by any means, but I was suitably impressed by his willingness to go full Dad Bod with how he looked in the movie.  Considering his character and how lonely and screwed-up the guy is, it actually makes sense for once to do an action movie where you're not hitting the gym or PEDs like a crazy person.  I kind of get the impression they cast Paula Patton because they wanted to cast Halle Berry but then she dropped out or said no, but it's probably the best thing Patton's ever done, not that I've seen her in much, and it's a surprisingly decent role for Val Kilmer, too, who turned in a few of these around that time.  I'm not big on time-travel plots and even less so on happy-ending ones, but this is one of the less irksome takes on it, as it feels like the "loop" of the movie does close itself, so, eh.  Not bad.

I Heart Huckabees - I have put off watching this for the longest time because I've heard so much about it in both directions that I had no idea who to trust.  Of course, had I looked into it more and realized David O. Russell co-wrote & directed, I wouldn't have been so worried.  This feels like the rare instance where watching a director's later films first helps to inform the earlier ones; I think the absurdity and dark humor of American Hustle or Silver Linings Playbook makes this all the more understandable, since this is in a similar vein, although considerably more abstracted and maybe a little too talky a lot of the time.  But this may be my favorite Mark Wahlberg performance of all time, and I wish we got to see that guy more.  Naomi Watts is pretty great in it, too, but when is she not?  I have never liked Jason Schwartzmann and I still don't, and the only role of his where I consider him good casting is Rushmore, because he's supposed to be a huge creep, but this is the closest to Rushmore quality compared to everything else he's done.  It's far from Russell's best work, but it makes the path he's walked a lot more obvious to have seen this.

Nothing better than that this time! I need to quit watching bullshit!

Edited March 29, 2022 by Contentious C

[Death From Above]

I had no idea Brian Bosworth (a contemporary of Bo Jackson who kinda flopped in the NFL) ever made movies but this looks absolutely batshit insane incredible.

 

[Contentious C]

Oh my God how did you not know about that?  I blame Canada.

[Death From Above]

I didn't have cable TV until I was like 17 because I grew up in a weird house so that's entirely fair.

[Raziel]

Stone Cold has the distinction of Lance Henrickson and William Forsythe knowing their in a massive piece of shit yet going all the fuck in anyway.  Its a really good BAD movie.

I'd highly recommend the Rifftrax version if you're into that, as well.  It *might* be Free for Prime on Amazon with bunch of other stuff, but I don't know for sure (I've been subbing to Rifftrax Friends so I haven't used the Prime stuff)

Edited March 29, 2022 by Raziel

[(BP)]

It’s pretty much a Jack Slater movie, which is to say it fucking rules. 

[HumanChessgame]

19 minutes ago, Death From Above said:

I didn't have cable TV until I was like 17 because I grew up in a weird house so that's entirely fair.

I didn't have cable/satellite for most of my childhood either, but remember seeing this on some local OTA channel on a Saturday afternoon. If you like this, there's another "cop goes undercover in a motorcycle gang and gets in over his head" movie released in the early 90s featuring a bemullted Charlie Sheen called Beyond the Law.

[Technico Support]

11 hours ago, Contentious C said:

Deja Vu - I guess Tony Scott made one decent film a decade, and this was his 2000s entry.

I hope you're classifying Unstoppable (2010) as being part of the next decade because that movie is the shit.

[Mister TV]

23 hours ago, Craig H said:

I still have yet to see it, but Duke is probably my favorite secondary character by far. I probably like him more than Apollo to be honest. I'm not sure how I feel about Stallone cutting Duke's speech before round 15, but if the rest puts more emphasis on Apollo and Duke then I'll probably be happy with it.

If you're a fan of the Rocky movies it's worth a watch.

[Craig H]

1 minute ago, Mister TV said:

If you're a fan of the Rocky movies it's worth a watch.

Yeah, I love the Rocky movies. I got introduced to them at a very young age. I think out of all of them, I probably like 2 the least until Adrian says, "WIN!" At that point, you could tell me to go climb mount everest and I'd do it.

My mom is a huge fan as well. My plan was to buy it on YouTube and then watch it with her until I had to put her in a nursing home.

I need to see if I can hook a Chromecast up to the tv in her room and then just bring her some popcorn and watch it with her. 

[elizium]

14 hours ago, Death From Above said:

I had no idea Brian Bosworth (a contemporary of Bo Jackson who kinda flopped in the NFL) ever made movies but this looks absolutely batshit insane incredible.

 

Always a good time to post Bo Jackson ending Boz's credibility as a football player