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2022 Movies Discussion Thread (v.2.0)


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@Curt McGirt you nailed it on the head. The highest compliment I think I can give a movie is that I'm sad having watched it because I'll never have the feeling of seeing it fresh for the first time

Like, it's such an experience that getting to the end has me sad I can't rewatch it from scratch since it won't have any surprises for me anymore

 

And yup, that definitely sums this up where I feel like this has to be one of my annual 90s rewatches like Things to Do in Denver when you're dead, starship troopers, The Immortals, Boys N the Hood and a few other ones. Like there's just a few dozen maybe where I never get tires of revisiting them and this goes on the list instantly 

 

@Mister TV also co-sign, would have loved a series with them on other cases. When they popped up I literally jumped in my seat, like on top of all the other surprise appearances they were the cherry on top

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Oh there are things you'll go back to and notice for the first time, trust me. I'm still trying to figure out what the story Gary Oldman was trying to tell when he shotgunned the gangsters was about.

Probably the biggest praise I can give to True Romance is it introduced me to Sonny Chiba. 

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That's right, hot dang I legit forgot he was in there with all the other stars popping up

Shit yeah I'd love a side movie for Oldman's character, I mean I really didn't recognize him at first hahaha. I was thinking WHO TF IS THAT until I recognized his eyes  ? Mister TV was on point, there's so many characters you could do splinter movies for before this one's timeline, as it's got such a dynamite cast.

I mean Dennis Hopper as Slater's dad, Walken's mob character. I'd love to hit the lotto and make a time machine to go back in time and set up Tarantino to do a bunch of True Romance-verse movies with the cast. Like, you can take any one of the guys just about and give them their own spinoff with them in the lead role, its such a deep bench.

 

And that Sonny Chiba mention, that was another clue it was a Tarantino script before they got to the comic book store, that Slater was so into martial arts flicks. Him fanboying over martial arts and comic books was what clued me in that this had to be a QT flick ?

Just might rewatch it this weekend 

Spoiler

Clerks III 2 sentence spoiler just in case you're not sure if you wanna check it out.

 

Randall gets a heart attack early, Dante is told to be super supportive as a friend so that Randall doesn't get depressed/suicidal, and Dante helps Randall film a movie about Randalls life since Randall is such a movie junkie.

They track down the cast from Clerks to play themselves, Randall is a giant asshole, Dante is a whiny yes man/support system battling depression due to flashbacks of Rosario Dawson's character, Dante ends up in hospital from stress/anger tied to the movie and the tragic memories, then Randall shows Dante the movie while Dante is in ICU and its Clerks footage, with Dante dying as the Clerks footage montage ends.

 

Edited by Hayabusa
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It’s interesting how influential Badlands was on Tarantino’s spec scripts from the 90s. 

I haven’t seen Clerks III yet, but all of that seems like an improvement over the leaked info about the original draft, which supposedly had some really bleak stuff in it (Hurricane Sandy riots and a Dark Knight Rises-inspired movie theater shooting.) 

 

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I had all those QT scripts at the time when I was working on my thesis. I don't remember how different the True Romance was different from the film. I don't think it was as different as his NBK script was from the movie. 

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On 10/19/2022 at 7:07 AM, Contentious C said:

I know a lot of people would say elves have pointy ears or certain complexions or beauty or immortality as their defining characteristic,

Tolkien's elves did not have pointed ears, so anybody trying to claim that as a defining characteristic of elfdom is obviously wrong.

That's all. Carry on.

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On 10/20/2022 at 3:31 PM, (BP) said:

[the Clerks III] original draft, which supposedly had some really bleak stuff in it (Hurricane Sandy riots and a Dark Knight Rises-inspired movie theater shooting.) 

big fucking YIKES

sign me up for a True Romance-verse.

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On 10/22/2022 at 1:03 PM, tbarrie said:

Tolkien's elves did not have pointed ears, so anybody trying to claim that as a defining characteristic of elfdom is obviously wrong.

That's all. Carry on.

That and "Balrogs have wings" are sadly going to outlast the actual representations.

Edited by Contentious C
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So it would appear that "Native American Protester" Sacheen Littlefeather wasn't actually Native American. This according to her sisters, who waited 50 years to say this for some reason:

 

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/oct/24/sacheen-littlefeather-faked-native-american-ancestry-say-family

Edited by Tabe
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12 hours ago, Contentious C said:

That and "Balrogs have wings" are sadly going to outlast the actual representations.

See, I regard the Balrog wing question as open to debate. The "no wings" camp does rely on some subtle arguing. (Except for the fact that Balrogs clearly couldn't fly, and why give your fictional monster wings if it doesn't fly?)

By contrast, Tolkien wrote multiple scenes that don't make sense if you assume it's easy to distinguish a mortal from an elf just by looking. So I've never understood why the pointed ears thing is considered one of the big debates.

 

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Oh, God.  You're one of those.  Why did I even bring it up?

Anyway, you know what the deal is.  This'll be...well, a little different.  It's Day 468 (and counting) of Some Crap Some Jerk Is Doing, Double Double Edition.

Your Baby's Dirty Diaper

The Double (2011) - Oh, Richard Gere; is there ever a more reliable bellwether of a garbage movie than him?  Maybe Vince Vaughn?  But at least Vaughn has Swingers and, I dunno, 1 or 2 other things that aren't the worst.  This Gere "thriller", which is about as thrilling as a stale ham sandwich, feels a lot like another movie of his, The Jackal, only considerably less compelling (and that's saying something when compared to a second-rate remake).  There's a BIG TWIST about 30 minutes in and then it's paired with ANOTHER BIG TWIST near the end, but then you're left in a situation where you're supposed to be on the side of...who, exactly?  And of course, it doesn't matter which side of the ball Gere is on, because no matter what, you don't buy it for a single second that this 60-odd OLD MAN is still supposed to be "the best" after all this time.  It kind of makes me want to watch that Jeff Bridges Hulu show just to see how ridiculous the stunts are there. 

X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes - I think someone else name-dropped this before when I reviewed The Lost Weekend, and for whatever reason (I guess Halloween), Kanopy has a boatload of MST3K-level stuff on its current roster, so I thought I'd give this a spin.  I expected All-Time Stinker Bad, but it's really just garden-variety bad, like the utterly pointless and grotesque eyeball shot that just hangs there forever for God's sake why did you spend a MINUTE of an EIGHTY minute movie on a prop eyeball?  Basically, it's just made with the sensibilities and forethought of a 12-year-old.  Oh, what would you do if you could see anything?  "I'd look at boobs and cheat at cards!"  Bah.  Sometimes the script tries to get more serious and hint at the far more interesting, borderline-Lovecraftian question of "How would your mind adjust to this much new information?" but mostly it just steps on itself rather than do anything remotely smart.  Case in point: you can tell Roger Corman & Co. had never been in a real laboratory in their entire lives, because WHO THE HELL WOULD SMOKE IN A LAB?  Do you have any clue how much flammable shit scientists work with on a daily basis?  No you don't, because you just wanted some goddamn beakers full of food coloring and dry ice.  Assholes.   Can't blame being dumb on being cheap.

AXE Body Spray Instead of Shower

The Double (2013) - This happened sort of by accident (though only sort of).  It's prompted in part by something I'll get to later, but also when I watched half of this and searched for it to watch the rest, the 2011 movie came up, too, so I had a bit of a theme to work with.  This...I suppose has a theme to work with, but I couldn't shake the notion that I'd seen (or in this case, read) it done better.  I didn't realize it was based on a Dostoevsky story until the credits rolled, but even then, the plot points felt a lot more like a tepid mash-up of two Harlan Ellison short stories: '"Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Tick-Tockman' and 'Shatterday'.  I feel like Ellison was probably onto something by deconvoluting the two disparate halves of this, because while there's a lot of obvious give and take to work with between the notion of bureaucratic and/or corporate tedium and the loss of one's identity, I feel like Ellison did a stellar job of writing 'Shatterday' with a lot of empathy, and this movie really lacks that, since it's too busy being jaunty and quizzically positing to you, "Oh, good sir in the audience, whatever might be going on with these two seeming twins?"  And then what happens is...exactly what you expect to happen, even if you don't know the source material.  Sometimes, though, Richard Ayoade was kind of onto something here with some of the way it's shot and the way the sound editing is handled, but there are far too few of those moments to make this work.  Also, I am officially taking a break from Jesse Eisenberg because I am SO SICK of these twitchy fucking characters he constantly plays.

Frank & Lola - Sometimes, even when something isn't a particularly good movie, it's the movie you want to watch right now.  Michael Shannon?  Great!  Imogen Poots in full Raccoon Eyeshadow mode for 50% of the film?  Even better!  This is twisted and fucked-up and weird and awkward, and if anything works well about it, it's that it leans on Shannon's natural menace without truly partaking like it could: it merely suggests the idea of a deeply insecure, murderous chef, and that's all it really needs to keep things moving in the right direction.  There are some plot points towards the end that are a little too ludicrous to be believed, so whatever it's building towards gets deflated like a badly-made souffle, but the ending tries to redeem that with a nice touch of ambiguity.  This probably would have been better if the script had gone through a couple more edits and the connections to Michael Nyqvist's character weren't so overwrought, but, it's also not the worst as it is, especially if you like the actors involved.

That'll Do, Pig

Set It Up - I've seen this pop up once or twice on social media about being an old-school rom-com, and, well, uh, maybe it is, but what it's really not is a *great* one.  I think the last one I saw that really struck me as being ahead of the curve was probably What If, which I talked about a number of months ago, and this is missing one key ingredient that that movie had in spades: over-the-top-great chemistry between the leads.  Zoey Deutch and Glen Powell are merely pretty good together, although Powell is one of those guys who seems like he's a 'movie star' type and the more you look at him, the more he looks like a bad DALL-E photo.  And when it comes to acting chops, Deutch is the only one of the two you really believe from start to finish.  Taye Diggs and Lucy Liu are just sort of there.  So if there's a real star here, it's the writing, which is actually pretty damned funny from the word 'go' and never lets up.  So, if you lean harder on the 'com' part of 'rom-com', this might be something you like more than I did.  It's decent; it's just not deserving of the kind of hype I've seen.

Yeah, But...

Road Games - Man, is this a strange film.  Brian May's score seems to belong to an entirely different set of circumstances, and yet there's his oddly comical music playing over this tense, dark, paranoid little twister.  It's a little bit like The Slumber Party Massacre in a sense, because you could read this purely as satirical of its genre if you wanted, but the thing is, it works pretty well if you read it straight, too.  Where this probably falls off is towards the middle, when Keach's character starts talking to himself and hallucinating; it's neither weird enough nor interesting enough to keep up the tension, because, if anything, by that point, you know precisely where the movie is going to go (and it does).  But what you get along the way is something that's very much its own thing: its own screwed-up sense of humor; its own portrayal of a country almost as American as America; its own strange cast of recurring characters who inevitably resurface over and over again to point out the absurdity of the events but also to warn you of how close to a jam-up this all becomes.

One Maple-Frosted Donut

The Visitor (2007) - We'll hear no Richard Jenkins-based slander in this arena, and when someone else said my review of the odious 1979 The Visitor briefly confused them, and having watched two movies called The Double, I naturally sought this out to close the loop, in a sense.  Holy fucking crap is this good.  It's Danai Gurira's first major film role, so if you're a fan and even if the rest of it were merely so-so, it'd be worth a look just to see her doing Indignantly Fierce Lady all the way back in 2007.  But the rest of this is just something else.  I can't really say what I like about it best.  Maybe it's the matter-of-fact way it treats New York City, instead of the Woody Allen/Nora Ephron blow-smoke-up-your-ass method of showing how WONDERFUL~! it is since its low points in the 60s and early 70s.  It isn't just another city, but it also suggests quite carefully that its willingness to try to be "The Big Apple" makes it more insidious, more monstrous because of events like those in this story.  Or maybe it's the acting, where everyone is so low-key (except Gurira, who, as we already established, does not do low-key) but it's like they're trying to one-up each other with how level-headed (and yet still awesome and broken and desperate) they all are.  Or maybe it's the fact that there's no genuine resolution to this, no easy answers, no peace at the center except what peace everyone has to *truly settle for*, instead of find.  Or maybe it's how all those elements are so crucial to each other to make this work so effectively.  2007 was a murderer's row for great movies, but this would belong on that row.

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4 minutes ago, odessasteps said:

Yes. In the novelization, there's a "disclaimer" from Welles disputing the invasion actually happened. 

I was sorta hoping that Men In Black would've used the War of the Worlds broadcast as a seagueway, but they had First Contact take place in 1961.

Edited by J.T.
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Just now, J.T. said:

I was sorta hoping that Men In Black would've used the War of the Worlds as a seagueway, but they had First Contact take place in 1961.

Too bad that didn't tie into FF 1. Although Marvel did end up owning the comic when they bought Malibu. 

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17 hours ago, J.T. said:

I was sorta hoping that Men In Black would've used the War of the Worlds broadcast as a seagueway, but they had First Contact take place in 1961.

That's the most interesting spelling of "segue" I've ever encountered.

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I'm quietly working on summarizing something else while I do the usual, so while I won't be talking about that this week, it'll probably be next, but the movies that are front-of-mind this week have some bearing on what I'll have to say next week (or the week after, or whenever I wrap it up).  But it's Day 475 of Some Crap by Some Guy, Casually Awful People Edition.

Your Baby's Dirty Diaper

Mr. Right (2015) - I have often wondered if we would see another Akiva Goldsman one of these days: someone who could write a genuinely high-quality film (in his case A Beautiful Mind) and also saddle us with a career otherwise full of dreck (most notably Batman & Robin and The Dark Tower).  Well, we have Max fucking Landis, who somehow wrote Chronicle but also wrote the atrocious Bright and also wrote this even more atrocious film, which is really, really, *REEEALLLY* close to dipping itself into the "Unforgivable Instance of Film Malpractice" territory.  And somehow, it has 3 actors I usually like: Tim Roth (who, granted, doesn't do much), Anna Kendrick, and Sam Rockwell (who is as annoying as often as he is good, let's face it).  But this is...this is quite possibly the least funny attempt at a comedy I have ever had to sit through.  I laughed at exactly one joke.  One.  Even Tomcats, which is painfully unfunny and idiotic, was funnier than this.  That's how bad this is.  But this movie also manages to pass itself off with the veneer of something like a normal film, kind of, sometimes?  I mean, it *looks* like what a romantic comedy is supposed to look like, and the camera moves the way it's supposed to, and it develops as much as it can with its totally asinine script that's full of plot holes, so I think it could con some folks into thinking it's better than it is, since it looks the part just enough.  But be forewarned: this is an incredibly shitty movie, leaning so hard on the charisma of its actors that it fails to recognize that the script is awful and the two leads don't actually have an ounce of chemistry together.  This is about 300 words more than this movie ever deserved to have written about it.

AXE Body Spray Instead of Shower

17 Again - In honor of Matthew Perry's self-own versus Keanu Reeves, I felt like taking a look at what he was up to between rehab stints #s 46 & 47.  Luckily, he's barely in the movie (thanks, rehab!), so Zac Efron can work some magic on something that's otherwise not particularly good.  This isn't up to the level of something like Mean Girls from a writing perspective, but if anything does work, it's Efron and Leslie Mann, who definitely have some highly effective May-December vibes going that had to make Judd Apatow question the sanctity of his marriage (or maybe she has a hall pass, who knows about these things).  The storylines with the kids are predictably judgy and lame, with a lot of cheerleading the boy and constantly guarding the girl for the exact same behavior.  The sections with Thomas Lennon and Melora Hardin don't really work either, as it seems relatively convincing early on that Lennon's character is gay and that would have worked fine, so the heterosexist treatment is a bit much, though I'm otherwise fine with Melora Hardin being in anything, anywhere, anytime.  So, yeah: stupid gimmick, a lot of predictable nonsense, but if you see this, you're gonna come away thinking Mann & Efron got it on in somebody's trailer at some point.

That'll Do, Pig

Two Women (1960) - This is (I think) my only early/prime Sophia Loren movie I've seen so far, and also the only Vittoria di Sica film I've seen, so I wasn't really sure what I was getting myself into with this.  And, for about 75 minutes or so, the film itself was definitely fooling me, too, as it's happy to lull you into a false sense of security.  But, with about 20 minutes left, this takes a disgusting, hard, unsettling left turn that totally smashes all the earlier in-jokes and scenes and subtlety totally to pieces, and it's difficult to judge how those two parts come together to make something, since the ending so starkly opposes everything that the rest of the movie deals with.  And said ending is about as blatantly racist as a movie can be, since we see all sorts of white World War II combatants in all manner of different formations and all of them comport themselves with some semblance of honor, even when they're waving a gun in someone's face.  But once the Savage Brown Folk show up, well, naturally, things get ugly, as if the rest of the soldiers weren't equally capable of being awful and doing awful things (they were, and they did).  I think these days Loren's acting could be seen as a bit overcooked, but it's still a movie that makes it clear what she had going for her when she was younger (and I mean 100% of that about her abilities, not her assets).  And there are a handful of really wonderful shots, especially early in the film, that make this stand out even today.  I also couldn't help shaking the feeling that this had to have been one of Anthony Minghella's touchstone movies, as a lot of it reminded me of the Natalie Portman section from Cold Mountain and The English Patient as well.

Frank & Cindy - I don't normally think much of movies based on real people - I think we should judge actors far more harshly when they portray a historical figure, rather than constantly lavishing them with fucking Oscars - but this might be the best role of Rene Russo's career.  Granted, that isn't exactly saying much, because has she been great in anything?  But this might come the closest.  The structure of the movie is, well...to call it predictable would be kind, because it's the same indie movie I've had to watch 250 times during this little streak, but the people and their relationships work well enough to keep you engaged.  It also features a pre-famous Jane Levy in a pretty solid role, though if she looked to you like she was 12 in Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist, then she looks about 10 here, which is a bit squick.  I usually find Oliver Platt to be just about the last person I want in a major role of any kind, but he plays such a schlubby little suckball of a human here that it works with everything else the film is trying to do.  Not a total waste of time, but, for once, I watched some really good stuff, so onto that...

Yeah, But...

August 32nd on Earth - If you said to me, 'Hey, let's watch a self-aware, fourth-wall-breaking love letter to French New Wave that comes off like a sadboi rewrote When Harry Met Sally...', I don't think Denis Villeneuve would have been my first or even fifteenth pick for its writer/director, and yet...here we are. I haven't watched the other early movie of his that Criterion has posted, but to my mind, the only "worse" movie he's made than this is Sicario, and that wasn't his fault (I blame the lame script and mediocre acting).  And that should be a pretty good indication of how good his whole fucking catalog is.  This has some rough moments, especially early on, when the editing and transitions are just not up to the standards he would set for himself later; he's clearly going for a specific tone here ("Hey, look at my big Jean Seberg poster!  Let me hit you over the head with that about 10 more times!"), but it often works better when he leaned on the quieter, less heavy-handed sort of choices he's now known for.  And God, this movie is just FUCKING GORGEOUS.  How does he do this?  How does he ALWAYS makes his movies look THIS good?  It's just totally masterful in the ways we've come to expect him to be, and this was his first full-length feature.  Jesus.  Just right out of the gate and his stuff worked.  It's ridiculous.

One Maple-Frosted Donut

Irma Vep (1996) - Olivier Assayas is someone who kind of annoys me.  In more than a few of his movies (and this is actually a case of it, too!), he will just drop what he's doing to go on a history tour so that we, the audience, get to learn about whatever latest obsession is living rent-free in his head, whether it's truly deserving to be part of the movie or not.  Luckily, this is an instance where that lesson is woven carefully into the fabric of everything else, because we spend so much of our time with Maggie Cheung (or is it "Maggie Cheung", or Earth-2 Maggie? Regardless, I'm here for it) digging into the role of Irma Vep in ways that are increasingly dangerous and voyeuristic.  It goes from being a Wong Kar-Wai or pre-Dardennes jaunt through Paris on a movie set, skirts a little bit of 8 1/2 but seemingly has the sense to realize there's no point in trying to add to that, and then it gets *really* weird as Maggie apparently loses her damned mind for a night (and so does the director of the "movie" she's in Paris to shoot).  And the neatest touch is that, for all its attempts to display the cat-herding nature of making a movie at all, what we understand by the end is that the movie that Earth-2 Paris will get will never be as good or as daring as the movie it could have had, if Jean-Pierre Leaud's volatile director had been able to keep his shit together.  Apparently HBO made this into a TV series and I can't think of anything I want to watch less.  This was already all it needed to be: punchy, crazy, wild, and a fun spin cycle through the life of a movie star.

Why They Make 'Em, Why We Watch 'Em

Cure - Point, counterpoint to the trippy, inexplicable mind-fuckery of Audition.  Between being mentioned in the Secret Satan thread and another friend of mine saying something about it elsewhere, I guess I just had to watch this today.  I think I like Audition just a little better than this, but not by much.  This pulls out all the stops in terms of tone, as even the tiniest sounds and gestures become deeply unsettling, as questions you've already heard a dozen different times unnerve you more and more as they keep getting asked and there's just never a satisfying answer.  And this is a really beautiful movie: it reminded me of August 32nd on Earth, or even Drive My Car, on more than a few occasions.  The acting is something else, as Koji Yakusho and Masato Hagiwara just utterly...well, there's a common way that reviewers would describe what they do as actors, but it would be something of a spoiler, ha ha ha.  I think if there's something about this that doesn't quite work, it's when the movie takes its inevitable hard left turn and becomes a bit more blatantly dissociative: given how gorgeous so much of the movie is and how easy it is to get used to the quality of the camera work, you will know when you hit that moment, and it takes you out of the sensation *too* much.  It's one of those jarring instances where it's easy to be very American and say, "But what does it all mean?" when this is a film that is totally, utterly, and completely unconcerned with giving you even the slightest answer about what is actually happening. 

Much like Audition, there are at least two fairly plausible paths "through" that could be supported by what we see, but what's real?  Well, figuring that out is always the problem, isn't it?

Edited by Contentious C
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