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2022 Movies Discussion Thread (v.2.0)

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RandomAct

RandomAct

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2 hours ago, Fuzzy Dunlop said:

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. 

I'm actually planning to buy a physical copy when they drop, which is a practice I save for a few movies at this point.

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Tabe

Tabe

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18 hours ago, Curt McGirt said:

 

A national treasure.

Man, those are great.  Never really seen Brolin interviews or anything before this.  I've missed out.

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Contentious C

Contentious C

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Posted (edited)

Yep, more movies, more nobody reading this crap.  Day 337 (and counting) of Some Movie Bullshit, Eight Days a Week Edition.

Hot Garbage

Stay - Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts, a pre-famous Ryan Gosling, the director of Finding Neverland, and the co-creator of Game of Thrones - what could possibly go wrong (OK, maybe that last one had something to do with it)?  A lot.  A WHOLE FUCKING LOT.  This almost gave In Dreams a run for its money for being the shittiest waste of Oscar-caliber talent on a flaccid "thriller", but nah, that turd is still worse than this.  But man, this is a good 80-90 minutes of emotionless, uninteresting garbage that makes you think the twist is going Fight Club/Number 23 and instead goes "Delusion for a Dragon Slayer".  That's about the only remote positive of the film - that the cruddy ending has at least a tiny touch of heart and compassion and empathy to it, but it's just too fucking bad the rest of the movie is so utterly boring and devoid of anything like a reason to care; if it had ten times fewer match cuts and more, I don't know, actual story?  It might not have been a complete waste of everyone's time.  Well, OK, not entirely true: Bob Hoskins has a minor role, and, at least during his first appearance, he's pretty awesome.  But stuff like that only draws attention to how little the rest of this works.

Addicted to Fresno - Ehhhhhh.  This has got a whole bunch of familiar faces in it, with Judy Greer and Natasha Lyonne front and center, but aside from maybe one scene that sets up the plot of the movie, it's solidly unfunny.  When your blooper reel during the credits is far and away the most hilarious thing about your comedy, you maybe didn't make a comedy.  There aren't enough purple dildos or blowjob lessons to make up for that.  Plus, the whole thing feels like a movie you might have seen on USA or a Showtime original from the 90s, instead of something someone actually put some care and craft into.  If the blandness of the movie were meant to stand in for the blandness of Fresno, then hey, that'd be almost compelling in a metatextual sense, but let's face it, that's not what was happening here.  At least it was short.

ALERT ALERT ALERT: HOT HOT SO HOT DUMPSTER FIRE COMIN' AT YA

Tomcats - Uggggggggh.  I get it, OK?  I get it.  No one expects Shannon Elizabeth to be doing Macbeth, no one's expecting Jerry O'Connell to spearhead a Thomas Pynchon adaptation or something.  The bar here is low; it's really low.  It's "be better than Joe's Apartment"-low. It's 2001, and American Pie had just done a ton of business, so I kinda get why something like this gets made, but holy fuckballs, how did someone - anyone - think this was good enough to make into a movie?  The...the EVERYTHING about this is terrible.  Painfully unfunny, badly written, beyond badly acted, ugly to look at, insulting on nearly every level, just...no.  There are maybe two things that would keep this from a place on Mount Flushmore: the first is that, if you're going to have a bunch of completely idiotic jokes, it's at least fitting that the main character is a cartoonist and some of the dumb sight gags are done Looney Tunes-style; and the second is the librarian/dominatrix scene, which might have been funny on its own if it didn't need to step on its own idea by taking it even further with the granny/librarian/dominatrix bit.  Otherwise, I would confidently say this is one of the biggest wastes of time and money I've ever seen...EXCEPT!  It made back its fucking budget!  WHAT THE HELL.

Acceptable

The Fault in Our Stars - I can't believe I'm putting this here, because a big chunk of this deserves a Hot Garbage honorable mention - looking at you Sam Trammell, who CANNOT FUCKING ACT any way except quirkily upbeat about every possible topic.  And of course this whole movie is like watching athletes inject steroids, if only Heartstring Tugging were an Olympic sport.  The only way it would have been more over-the-top is if both characters had cystic fibrosis instead of cancer (maybe they did in the book, I don't fucking know).  But man, do Ansel Elgort, Willem Dafoe, and Laura Dern act the SHIT out of this every step of the way.  I just found myself wanting to hate it and through gritted...goddamned...teeth, I just didn't quite hate it.  It's unfortunately somewhat effective.  It's still also derivative crap on plenty of levels, but evidently, with the right people, that can fly.

Martha Marcy May Marlene - I used to really like John Hawkes' work, but I've realized lately that he has two modes: diffident nice guy a la Deadwood, and giant redneck creep, such as this or Winter's Bone.  But this is the Elizabeth Olson show, and if she'd been hit by a car after making this movie, she'd have already acted galaxy-sized circles around her sisters with this alone.  It's not great, but for a movie that doesn't really have a plot to speak of, that's almost entirely told in flashbacks and ambiguity, it's ridiculously well-done and authentic.  That said, practically every detail of the cult stuff is something you'd predict in advance, assuming you have even a passing familiarity with how they work, so it won't really surprise you.  It feels at times like it could have used more background to set up why she'd even end up in a place like that, but clearly the filmmakers were more concerned with displaying the damage after, rather than the damage before.

Awesome

Distant Voices, Still Lives - I think this just sneaks into this category for some unusual reasons.  First, I'd recently watched The Deep Blue Sea and came away thoroughly unimpressed with Terence Davies in that; seeing this just makes it all the more apparent how tepid that film is.  Similarly, this movie came out a couple of years before The Dead, which I also mentioned about a month ago, and that was yet another period piece that this just blew totally out of the water in terms of quality.  The second reason that this worked for me is that it almost struck me as a bit of a smack in the face to the Merchant/Ivory style of British movies that were just gaining steam around that time, a bit of working-class realism to thumb its nose at the first-world problems of a bunch of aristocrats farting around.  I still prefer Mike Leigh to something like this, but this is pretty special, too.  The music is not just well used but well-chosen, almost like it's from another world, and I suppose to some extent it is.  Most of the acting is great, and while the transitions back and forth through time are a bit jarring, it's as close to stream-of-consciousness as I've seen a film get without going off the deep end.  Not the kind of thing that would be everyone's cup of tea, and really hard to watch during the many disturbingly violent moments, but compelling nevertheless.

Small Engine Repair - Show up for Shea Whigham and Jon Bernthal, stay for the black humor and the devil's bargain.  The first 20 or 30 minutes of this make it seem like it's just going to be another brotastic small-town indie dramedy about people who can't get out of their own way, but man, does the second half take a majorly bleak turn.  And it has a ton to say about class warfare, money, social media, justice, violence, and cowardice in its many forms.  The ending is somehow the right ending and also still so thoroughly wrong that you feel the outrage of all the central characters.  Oh, and did I mention Shea Whigham and Jon Bernthal?  This seems like the kind of movie that's right up the alley of, oh, about 80% percent of you, if only you actually read this.

Something Else

The Worst Person in the World - I suppose this should go into Awesome, if I'm being as level-headed as possible about it, but this is not the kind of movie that feels level-headed to me, mostly because (aside from the dark turn it takes toward the end) there's just a massive amount of this that feels like it got scooped out of my own life.  It's hard to watch slow-motion car crash relationships when you can still see your own scars.  Having said that, it's got three or four pretty memorably shot scenes that are probably the things critics would focus on, and that's deserved.  It's got a little bit of that Annie Hall vibe, too, where it's willing to toy around with its sense of reality a bit (not quite to the level of fourth-wall breaking, though) and be playful about things that are inherently sad.  But, as good as this is, I'm not sure any of it would work without Renate Reinsve, who just oozes charisma even more than she cries on cue.  She definitely got screwed out of an Oscar nomination for this, though winning at Cannes is nothing to sneeze at.

Edited by Contentious C
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(BP)

(BP)

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Posted

My wife’s at work all day and my kids are with their grandmother, and I’ve got edibles, so I’ve decided to go to hell tonight: I’ve never seen Avatar. 

Spoiler

Fear and Loathing in Pandora

B4-D21-D1-A-8-AF8-4580-8-E11-946-EF7-FCE

See you on the other side with a review, unless I’m captured by Sigourney Weaver in a mech suit…OR SOMETHING…again I have not seen the movie.

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RandomAct

RandomAct

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On 6/15/2022 at 11:38 PM, Contentious C said:

Tomcats - Uggggggggh.  I get it, OK?  I get it.  No one expects Shannon Elizabeth to be doing Macbeth, no one's expecting Jerry O'Connell to spearhead a Thomas Pynchon adaptation or something.  The bar here is low; it's really low.  It's "be better than Joe's Apartment"-low. It's 2001, and American Pie had just done a ton of business, so I kinda get why something like this gets made, but holy fuckballs, how did someone - anyone - think this was good enough to make into a movie?  The...the EVERYTHING about this is terrible.  Painfully unfunny, badly written, beyond badly acted, ugly to look at, insulting on nearly every level, just...no.  There are maybe two things that would keep this from a place on Mount Flushmore: the first is that, if you're going to have a bunch of completely idiotic jokes, it's at least fitting that the main character is a cartoonist and some of the dumb sight gags are done Looney Tunes-style; and the second is the librarian/dominatrix scene, which might have been funny on its own if it didn't need to step on its own idea by taking it even further with the granny/librarian/dominatrix bit.  Otherwise, I would confidently say this is one of the biggest wastes of time and money I've ever seen...EXCEPT!  It made back its fucking budget!  WHAT THE HELL.

I have to admit that I thought this movie was hilarious twenty years ago. I've also not watched it since 2002, and I can't imagine it holding up. I *do* still use the line "I guess that's why they call 'em nuts".

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EVA

EVA

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Watched a couple of things over the long weekend:

Kurosawa’s HIGH AND LOW. I think this is generally considered one of Kurosawa’s minor works, but I guess that speaks to his brilliance as a director, because there’s genius on display here. The majority of the film takes place in one room, but Kurosawa uses incredibly precise staging and framing to create energy on the screen, tell the story through subtle actions, and guide the viewer’s eyes to interesting compositions. I feel like any streaming-age director who thinks scenes of characters in a room talking have to be static, shot/reverse shot tedium (and, boy, there seems to be a lot of them!) should be forced to watch this film.

I would love to read something about Kurosawa’s thought process in making this film, as it came after his run of classic samurai epics, so I would assume he was deliberately playing against type by making a modern era film that feels so small. He even casts Toshiro Mifune, the gruff hero of his samurai epics, as a hopeless victim who is broken down over the course of the film.

Honestly feels Iike it’s time for somebody to remake this.

Elsewhere…

I think I’m officially the low-bidder on all things Robert Eggers moving forward. He’s clearly a master stylist/craftsman, and there may be no one better at creating fully realized, bespoke worlds on film right now…but THE NORTHMAN was the third straight film of his where the credits rolled and I was left with the question, “Okay, and…?” He has just never landed a story with me.

And you know what? We live in a world where the state of mainstream cinema is so fucking dire that even Michael Bay can be hailed as a returning hero, so maybe what Eggers is doing is good enough.  He is holding the line against the likes of Netflix making all their productions shoot on the same equipment. And I certainly hope monied people keep giving him millions of dollars to have his actors wear period-appropriate straight shoes and exhaustively research the accuracy of all pagan rituals depicted on screen. But his stuff is clearly not for me.

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Lawful Metal

Lawful Metal

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Posted

Watched Uncharted last night.  Really great and adorable adventure movie.  Had some of Uncharted in it, but not really an Uncharted movie.  I enjoyed it.  It was cute.  Not groundbreaking or anything, but fun. 

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Contentious C

Contentious C

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Posted (edited)

Yep.  It's back.  You don't care.  It's Day 344 (and counting) of Whatever This Is, Borrowed Ideas Edition.

Hot Garbage

Berberian Sound Studio - This might annoy some people, if anyone were reading or caring, but wow, what a waste of time and potential.  It's got 3 or 4 moments that are legitimately creepy, and some of the editing is interesting, at least once in a while, but does it ever spend a lot of time pointing out how the Overbearing Producer is overbearing instead of, I don't know, getting to the point of anything else.  The whole "actress who screws everyone over" subplot feels like a massive waste of time, for example, unless the point of the film were to call out sexism in the film industry.  And maybe there's something to that, given the film-within-a-film structure, but it's not like it's done *well*.  This feels like 25 minutes of possibly good ideas that somehow got stretched out to 90 minutes, instead of trying to make the first hour of it have some actual punch that paid off at the end.  If there's anything to get out of this, it's mostly the details of how Foley artists work, some of which I already knew.  And it feels like the opposite of the (admittedly few) Giallo movies I've seen; there, lots happens and you have no idea why; here, it's all set up but then it goes nowhere with that time spent.

Lemon - This movie goes to the trouble of giving itself a precious little blurb that gives the "bad product" definition of lemon, and I want to append to that as an example: "This fucking movie was a lemon".  Brett Gelman is a little too good at playing insufferable characters you want to see receive their comeuppance, except here, where a character he wrote is just...too goddamn uninteresting to care either way.  This feels like it's leaning too hard on having a lot of familiar faces do a lot of silly bullshit, but it basically never makes you actually care about why anyone is happy or unhappy or deserves (or doesn't) what is happening to them.  Yet another indie movie about someone self-destructing, except even the least capable of those typically makes you think something one way or the other about the person it's happening to; this can't even be bothered to muster up that. 

Slam Dance - I think it's time we invent a new genre.  This isn't film noir, because it doesn't deserve to be classified there.  It's more like 'flim' noir, since it's too fucking flimsy to sustain itself in any meaningful way.  No idea why the guy who directed The Joy Luck Club of all things also got roped into this pointless mess, but here we are.  The first ten minutes have more good ideas in them than the last 90, and that's hardly enough to have made that 10 minutes worth watching.  There are a handful of moments in that opening stretch that make you think, "Oh, it's kind of kafkaesque, like it's predating The Big Lebowski without actually being funny," but even that gets tossed overboard so it can jerk off this limp script to a bullshit conclusion that you couldn't care less about.   But hey, John Doe and Adam Ant got paid to be in this, so, I guess it's not all bad.

Acceptable

Nightmare Alley - I hadn't seen the original, so I had been wanting to see this for a while, but it's not a particularly compelling film except in the usual ways that every del Toro movie is compelling.  It's well acted sometimes - David Straithairn and Willem Dafoe might be the highlights, which is like saying water is wet - but it's got some weak points too, namely Rooney Mara, who I usually love but is flatter here than Kyrie Irving's home planet.  Cate Blanchett's whole storyline is not terribly interesting, either; in fact, the second act in general is just not as intricate or as authentic as the first, and by the time everything has to resolve itself, you can spot the ending a million miles away without having read the book or seen the earlier adaptation.  It is fun to look at, though, and in some ways I liked this better than The Shape of Water, but I wouldn't have nominated either one for Best Picture.

Manic - Hey, it's Muppet Babies 500 Days of Summer!  OK, not really; it's more 'someone besides Gus Van Sant got really obsessed with the Dardennes and tried that style to middling effect'.  This has a lot of young versions of familiar faces, and nearly everyone brings something to the table that makes this better (kind of makes me wonder why Sara Rivas didn't do more acting, actually), but you have to question the believability of any group home or psych ward that lets as many enormous lapses happen as happen here.  Or maybe I'm wrong; maybe that is the norm for them.  And on some level, it feels like it doesn't address what the premise of the film purports itself to address, except in sidelong glances and one Interstellar moment from Don Cheadle.  But, it's worth a watch, especially to remind yourself that Zooey Deschanel can really fucking act when she has something to work with.

Leave No Trace - This is not the Boy Scouts documentary that's on Hulu; this is a 2018 movie directed by Debra Granik, who also directed Winter's Bone, and this is another "fringes of society" kind of movie.  In fact, I think most people who see this now would probably find it incredibly similar to Nomadland, except this came out a couple of years before, around the time Chloe Zhao had just released The Rider.  Maybe the only thing Nomadland truly has over this film is the cinematography and scope, which is obviously breathtaking (though I wonder if it really deserved Best Picture, either), whereas this film has a bit more tunnel vision to focus just on the father and daughter at the center.  And they're pretty good together.  It also reminds me a little bit, now that I think of it, of First Reformed, mostly because of how still the camera was for so much of the film.  And when Ben Foster's character is indoors or left alone, it feels like that's how the movie frames his mental issues, like the quiet gets to him.  I don't think this is as good as that movie, either, but it's pretty good all in all.

Palm Springs - This might have been as close to Awesome as anything from this group, but it gets slightly dinged for being the Raunchy and Irreverent Groundhog Day, while The Map of Tiny Perfect Things was the Sentimental Teen Rom-Com Groundhog Day.  I think I might like the latter film just a bit more, mostly because it's a little more even, whereas the best part of this is nearly always Cristin Milioti.  But having said that, I never really liked Andy Samberg in much of anything until this (never watched Brooklyn Nine-Nine, so...yeah); it's the first time I've seen where he's come off as a believable main character.  And, as per usual, J.K. Simmons makes all things better.  But aside from them and the shenanigans they get up to, it can feel a little bit flat with respect to everyone else in the film.  That may be its weakest point.  I haven't had the opportunity to rewatch much of anything in rapid succession in a long time - one of the major drawbacks of doing something like this - but this is probably as close to instantly rewatchable as anything I have seen lately.

Edited by Contentious C
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Brian Fowler

Brian Fowler

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I saw Top Gun Maverick a second time. It's still really damn good, though the middle part does sag a bit. But the first ten minutes and last hour are the best thing I've seen in a theater this year.

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colonial

colonial

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Posted

With my daughter visiting her grandparents on her late mother's/my late wife's side out of state, now was the perfect opportunity to go to the movies to see a "grown up film" in a theater for the first time in forever.

The Phantom of the Open is a "based on a true story" film about Maurice Flitcroft, a crane operator who decides, at age 46 and having never played a round of golf in his life, to try and qualify for the British Open. 

It's essentially a story about an eternal optimist who put his dreams aside decades earlier, only to pursue them again as his children grow up. It's humorous, but doesn't attempt to be "mile a minute" funny that most popcorn flicks try to do these days. Mark Rylance is great as Flitcroft -- one can argue dark horse Best Actor Oscar nominee for his work.

There are times where you should just sit back and enjoy the film and not question its accuracy ...

Spoiler

If this film is to be believed, British Open qualifiers are regularly broadcast on TV.

Did have some minor issues with the plot -- tension seemed to be a bit forced near the film's climax. And there was at least one scene that sparked a few groans in the theater ...

Spoiler

Near the end of the film, Flitcroft is introduced at a banquet for his namesake golf tournament in Michigan by someone who is clearly Tiger Woods but not identified. The speech he gives also contained a significant "British-ism" that the real Woods wouldn't say, talking about how was preparing for his "first U.S. Masters at Augusta." A Brit would say that, as I believe there was a British Masters tournament at one time on the European Tour, but an American wouldn't say that. That got a chuckle out of me.

Regardless, I thought it was a good film and a welcome respite from talking animals, cartoons and other "bells and whistles" types of movies.

One other thing I got a kick out of ...

Spoiler

For the first British Open qualifier, Flitcroft was paired with two other golfers. One was a fictional Frenchman created for the film, but the other was a gentleman named Jim Howard, who is credited with being the first Black PGA Professional in the UK. 

 

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