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2022 Movies Discussion Thread (v.2.0)


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I watched 3 movies yesterday and I'm not sure why. Matrix Resurrections was OK, but unnecessary and is probably the 4th best Matrix movie. Also Christina Ricci is on the cast list but I have no idea who she was in the movie. Ghostbusters: Afterlife was bad. Just a pointless retread, that wasn't even fun. And Fighting with my Family was... probably a lot more entertaining to people who haven't watched any wrestling. Knowing the story the way it actually happened, and knowing what some of the people depicted in the movie are actually like, really hurt the movie watching experience. It's just pro-WWE propaganda, basically. Re-written history. And it's really unsure of whether it's depicting Wrestling as a shoot or a work... like they show someone working stiff and semi-shooting during a match as hitting THREE Body Slams and a Tombstone. But also suggest that giving receipts is bush league and unprofessional. It's bizarre.

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For those who may remember, I live near a Florida community with three theaters and a total of 24 screens. And as an independent movie house, there was a time where the owners would fill some of the screens with first-run movies no one had ever heard of. For some films, it may have been the token screening necessary to say that it, yes, got a theatrical release. A new film with Steven Seagal? Yeah, they'll show it. How about the latest with Dolph Lundgren? Yup. I called it "the island of lost cinema," and all of that went away when the pandemic hit.

Today, there is just one of three theaters open -- the second is in a permanent state of renovation, while the third is being used as a COVID-19 testing facility. The owners recently said they want all three open, but Hollywood needs to provide more films to theaters. There is some truth to it, as our theater has been showing "Father Stu" for eight weeks and counting (By comparison, "Sonic 2" and "The Bad Guys" both got the boot after three weeks). 

However, given the popularity of "Top Gun 2," it appears the owners realized that they had to bring back the island of lost cinema concept to lure people to an alternative in case Cruise and company were sold out. Premiering this weekend at my local cinema ...

 

WOLF HOUND

For those that enjoy watching planes, closeups of planes, and closeups of people flying planes, this may be the film for you.

 

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I liked the Thomas Jane Punisher well enough, but it's really strange that the concept was apparently "okay let's weld an origin story into Welcome Back, Frank. Okay, good... Now can we lose all the jokes? Yeah all of them."

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40 minutes ago, Brian Fowler said:

I liked the Thomas Jane Punisher well enough, but it's really strange that the concept was apparently "okay let's weld an origin story into Welcome Back, Frank. Okay, good... Now can we lose all the jokes? Yeah all of them."

I wish they'd lost all of the Welcome Back, Frank stuff. The Max stuff was great, but I hated Ennis' 616 Punisher stuff where he wrote like it was Hitman or Preacher...

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3 hours ago, colonial said:

WOLF HOUND

For those that enjoy watching planes, closeups of planes, and closeups of people flying planes, this may be the film for you.

 

At least they’re able to capitalize on it. Because of Covid, the Asylum ripoff of Top Gun: Maverick came out two years ago.

 

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On 6/3/2022 at 7:36 PM, John from Cincinnati said:

Your move, Marvel.

 

I put over this film earlier in the thread, but I'll double down on this being the most rewarding 3 hours I have spent watching a movie in a long time.  I've been talking to a girl from India the last couple of months, and she did a good job of helping me understand why this movie was such a big deal, and knowing what goes on with Indian cinema in general. Seriously, watch RRR you guys.

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You know the drill by now.  It's Day 329 (and counting) of Whatever This Is, A Day Late and Way Short of Good Movies Edition.

Hot Garbage

We Own the Night - 15 years ago, I might have felt differently about this movie, at least enough to kind of like it.  But it's just such bland copaganda that it's the kind of thing I feel I'm allergic to anymore.  The opening shot of the movie proper (not the montage) is likely the highlight of the movie, and not just because (to borrow a phrase from the fittingly named EVA) Eva Mendes is seductively diddling herself in the opening scene - and let's face it, when you have generationally gorgeous Latinas doing this for your movie, it's something of a bellwether that your movie may suck -  but because it kind of feels for a second like Paul Thomas Anderson trying to do a Marty-style crime movie, and you realize, hey, I...sort of want to see that?  But then everything else that follows is just worse and less believable.  The finish of the film is totally fucking ridiculous, or at least it would have been until certain news out of Texas happened.  There were about sixty better directions this could have taken, but instead it takes the most boring one possible.  I'm glad I never have to watch it again.

The Banger Sisters - Oh God, who asked for this garbage?  I guess, much like Rock of Ages, there's a desire every 5 to 10 years to dust off some fossils and roll out a bunch of gunked-up nostalgia crud so that rich Boomers can make a little more money off of broke Boomers.  I think I watched this mostly because of a Twitter exchange where someone lamented that one of the worst trends in recent film was that Susan Sarandon no longer acted slutty in things, and she responded to say, "There's still time."  If this is the quality of what you're going to make, please don't.  That I haven't described anything particular about the film should tell you how thoroughly uninteresting every single second of it is.

Serious Moonlight - I thought briefly about putting this higher, but I realized that would be a little too sentimental of me.  This was written by Adrienne Shelly, who also wrote and directed Waitress, which I talked about a few months ago.  It turns out that, sadly, she had a much more interesting life - or more to the point, an end - than her films did, and it seems that Cheryl Hines, who starred in Waitress, directed this out of respect for her slain friend.  This has a pretty ridiculous plot, and Meg Ryan and Timothy Hutton are both dull as dishwater for most of it, but there is at least one stretch where Justin Long's character makes things pretty choppy and intense (weird things to say about Justin Long, I know), and it *almost* gets better.  Plus, the ending is pretty good, even if you see it coming a mile away.  But those two positives just don't outweigh the badly written, badly acted bulk of this short and yet somehow flabby movie.

4:44 - Last Night on Earth - Yet another movie with two good scenes buried among a pile of refuse.  But hey, Natasha Lyonne!  No, actually, no, I don't care that she's in this.  This movie is just so far up its own ass so much of the time that almost nothing about it - not the sex scenes, not Willem Dafoe, not the two really interesting bits - shake you out of the dread of when you're going to get YET ANOTHER GRAINY MONTAGE of spliced-together war/mumbo-jumbo/politics/religion/civil unrest crap.  I spent the bulk of this wondering how These Final Hours had probably half the budget (or less) and no famous people at all and was 10 times better with nearly the same setup. 

All About Nina - I kind of hate putting this here for a couple of reasons.  First, I love Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and for a lot of this, she's pretty good, if not flat-out great.  And second, it's pretty clear that this was (unfortunately) an autobiographical effort from the writer/director, and the last thing you really want to do is badmouth someone who has the guts to put something this personal and this fucked-up out there into the world.  But...ughhhh, it's not *good*.  It's just not.  Common...where do I fucking start with this guy.  GO DO ANYTHING ELSE PLEASE.  He has three facial expressions: No Expression, Serial-Killer-Smiling, and Serial-Killer-Angry.  He's SO BAD in this.  Just stop being in movies, forever.  And the film spends so much time right in the meat of it with this drawn-out, "We're doing the cliche thing where we vibe so well that we stay up all night talking" bit, and it just murders to death whatever tone was being set at the beginning, which, big shock, matches the tone towards the end.  And in between, there's a heaping helping of "Haha, West Coasters are all crystal-loving fruit loops, let's make fun of them" in place of, I don't know, characters?  That said, the strongest pieces of this are especially ballsy, and they *almost* wrangle it into being watchable, but holy shit, did this ever need an editor and a better goddamn cast.

Acceptable

Courage Under Fire - This is both a better-than-expected war film and a disappointing Edward Zwick movie, although I don't know how disappointed I should really be, since he made only one really great movie anyway.  It's funny in a sense to see Scott Glenn (from, among other things, Man on Fire) and Denzel Washington (who later remade Man on Fire!) in scenes, especially with Glenn as the one who's put-together and compassionate.  It's almost too bad he hasn't had more roles like that.  Meg Ryan is sort of all over the place in this; she's pretty good when it's a particularly tense or crazy scene, but she also does what has to be one of the worst Southern accents in film history.  Just Looney Tunes mimicking Gone with the Wind-level bad.  Maybe the two most pleasant surprises of the movie, though, are turned in by Matt Damon and Seth Gilliam, the former of whom goes straight Christian Bale Machinist diet for his role.  A lot of the rest of it is pretty standard stuff for the era and our war-fetishizing dumbass nation, complete with the tied-up-with-a-bow happy ending, but at least the characters feel appropriately lived-in and broken, considering their circumstances.  Might have been the best movie out of this batch, which should tell you something.

Grandma - This probably is getting a bit of run on Hulu these days since Julia Garner has become a star, but this actually came out years ago.  Lily Tomlin could probably do movies like this in her sleep, and she's fun as the insufferable asshole she typically plays.  But there's one scene close to the middle of the movie that telegraphs that a man wrote this, and, given the subject matter and its relevance in our dumbass nation today, it makes you kind of want to roll your eyes a bit, even if the scene in question is otherwise well-played (by Sam Elliott, but without Sam Elliott's Mustache!).  It feels like it runs out of steam a little bit by the end, when it has to rope in the mother to the grandmother/granddaughter pairing, and I don't know that the whole Judy Greer storyline works, but otherwise it's relatively solid and a fairly authentic mini-odyssey.  This had to be one of Elizabeth Peña's last roles, too, which makes me fucking sad.

Crimes of the Future - Oh man, where to start.  Well, Viggo is pretty good in this, and Kristen Stewart is even better; since this is getting some shitty reviews, her performance is bound to get overlooked, but it's one of her better ones.  Someone online called her a sweaty little weasel and it's just the best description of how she plays her character.  But, uh...that's about all that really works here.  It's just painfully unclear what this is *really* about.  Is it about how people damage the planet?  Is it about our culture's obsession with beauty turning us into copycat freaks?  Is it about how pleasure and contentment feel further away today because it's so easy to get a dopamine hit from the tiniest, stupidest thing online? Is it an outward, body-horror-style expression of how people's thoughts change over time and how our stagnant societies and governments fight those ideological changes tooth and nail?  Is it all of the above?  Probably, but it's not like it does *any* of those themes well.  Sometimes - but only sometimes - this vision feels like a presentation of the future world that Videodrome was hinting at, and that's probably the best compliment I can pay it.  But, the rest of the time, this is so obtuse and so far up its own ass that you wonder how it could find any new organs when it was buried so deeply in an old one.  This might be Cronenberg's worst movie, but, if nothing else, the stuff it will likely inspire is probably going to be worth seeing someday.

Edited by Contentious C
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I happened across Narc in my DVR so gave it a watch, because Ray Liotta of course. It was pretty hard-boiled but also felt like a long episode of CSI or one of those fucking shows. They putter around beating on suspects and finding dead guys for awhile, then all of the sudden they catch two guys and there is an ENORMOUS explanation-drop that lasts damn near a whole half hour. And the reveal isn't really that shocking or interesting at all. That said Ray gets a really great monologue and if you want unhinged Ray then he's right here swinging a shotgun at your face. 

There are sadder things to say about the damn near $50 I spent on Cockfighter. Only got through about half of it so far and it just isn't that interesting. Guess it is kind of neat seeing Warren Oates play mute, and Harry Dean is always a treat, but the cock fights are disheartening and uncomfortable to watch and I just don't really care about Oates' macho code-of-honor vow of silence. I'll finish it eventually but it certainly wasn't worth the shekels. Also, for a BluRay, this is the worst looking transfer I've ever seen -- surely they just didn't have a better print because this thing could be confused for a VHS at points. 

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17 minutes ago, Curt McGirt said:

I happened across Narc in my DVR so gave it a watch, because Ray Liotta of course. It was pretty hard-boiled but also felt like a long episode of CSI or one of those fucking shows. They putter around beating on suspects and finding dead guys for awhile, then all of the sudden they catch two guys and there is an ENORMOUS explanation-drop that lasts damn near a whole half hour. And the reveal isn't really that shocking or interesting at all. That said Ray gets a really great monologue and if you want unhinged Ray then he's right here swinging a shotgun at your face. 

There are sadder things to say about the damn near $50 I spent on Cockfighter. Only got through about half of it so far and it just isn't that interesting. Guess it is kind of neat seeing Warren Oates play mute, and Harry Dean is always a treat, but the cock fights are disheartening and uncomfortable to watch and I just don't really care about Oates' macho code-of-honor vow of silence. I'll finish it eventually but it certainly wasn't worth the shekels. Also, for a BluRay, this is the worst looking transfer I've ever seen -- surely they just didn't have a better print because this thing could be confused for a VHS at points. 

I haven't seen Cockfighter in years but all I can vaguely remember is a young Ed Begley Jr. playing some sort of rich kid Cockfighter. 

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Finished Cockfighter, after watching (drum roll please)... THE FIRST EPISODE OF DEADWOOD. Yes, I'm finally digging in. So, finishing Cockfighter kind of felt like the right thing to do and I cued it up to where I think I left off. It really is a bizarre film. The games have their own lingo, everything is very documentary style (these are definitely legit hillbillies betting on the death of a chicken), and it kind of has no point and goes nowhere. It just IS, like this invisible eye taking a peek into a strange underworld. Storywise it does at least end with a final, brutal cock fight where you can see razor penetration of fowl flesh so they certainly built to the money shot. Extremely bizarre film, and no wonder it didn't make Corman any money.

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3 hours ago, Curt McGirt said:

Finished Cockfighter, after watching (drum roll please)... THE FIRST EPISODE OF DEADWOOD. Yes, I'm finally digging in. So, finishing Cockfighter kind of felt like the right thing to do and I cued it up to where I think I left off. It really is a bizarre film. The games have their own lingo, everything is very documentary style (these are definitely legit hillbillies betting on the death of a chicken), and it kind of has no point and goes nowhere. It just IS, like this invisible eye taking a peek into a strange underworld. Storywise it does at least end with a final, brutal cock fight where you can see razor penetration of fowl flesh so they certainly built to the money shot. Extremely bizarre film, and no wonder it didn't make Corman any money.

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7 hours ago, Curt McGirt said:

Finished Cockfighter, after watching (drum roll please)... THE FIRST EPISODE OF DEADWOOD. Yes, I'm finally digging in. So, finishing Cockfighter kind of felt like the right thing to do and I cued it up to where I think I left off. It really is a bizarre film. The games have their own lingo, everything is very documentary style (these are definitely legit hillbillies betting on the death of a chicken), and it kind of has no point and goes nowhere. It just IS, like this invisible eye taking a peek into a strange underworld. Storywise it does at least end with a final, brutal cock fight where you can see razor penetration of fowl flesh so they certainly built to the money shot. Extremely bizarre film, and no wonder it didn't make Corman any money.

The reviews on IMDB for this movie are hilarious. They're so pretentious and overwrought, proclaiming all kinds of art house greatness and so on in this movie. 

It was apparently filmed in Georgia where such activities were legal so the fights are real. 

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So YouTuber makes a (long) video about the career of James Gunn. Decides to premiere it (today) on her time off while she's recovering from surgery.

Someone tells James Gunn about it on twitter, and he retweets the link, then not only starts watching the premiere, but actually joins the livechat and starts interacting with the viewers.

 

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Totally posted in the wrong thread last night. Here we go...

"Everything Everywhere All At Once" is available for digital purchase, not streaming yet. The wife wanted to see it so badly that we spent the $20 and it's easily worth way more than that. Fucking GREAT.

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17 hours ago, christopher.annino said:

Totally posted in the wrong thread last night. Here we go...

"Everything Everywhere All At Once" is available for digital purchase, not streaming yet. The wife wanted to see it so badly that we spent the $20 and it's easily worth way more than that. Fucking GREAT.

One I'd like to see at some point. Glad you both enjoyed it.

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I saw Everything Everywhere All At Once for the second time at the cinema over the weekend which is the first time I've gone to the cinema twice for a film since Fury Road. 

It's even better the second time. 

Edited by Fuzzy Dunlop
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