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2021 MOVIES DISCUSSION


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Finally got around to watching the last of the new Planet of the Apes movies.  A pretty clear drop-off in quality as that series went further along.  All kinds of glaring plot holes in the last one, though I liked the Christopher Columbus-style bit of irony toward the end.  Mostly I just wondered why we needed to have a billion-dollar movie franchise that lets us fake-empathize with fake apes when we could have spent a billion dollars actually empathizing with them by, I don't know, not destroying their habitats and not hunting them into extinction.  We really are the worst.

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3 hours ago, The Natural said:

Feel the same way. Can't stand James Corden. @AxB is no fan of James Corden either. Few more here as well.

So many stories out there about how Corden is a DIRL.

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17 hours ago, Web Conn said:

Anyone else watch Promising Young Women? I don’t know what to say other than watch it.

It is totally awesome and completely depressing.   I think that it is outstanding that someone finally made a women's revenge thriller that wasn't an exploitation film.

I like how it puts the "nice guy" illusion on blast and shows how everyone (even women) can be complicit in toxic male culture.

The symbolism is a bit much at times.  I'm fairly smart and don't usually need to be beaten over the head with blatant metaphors.

Edited by J.T.
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Since I'm currently down to just Amazon Prime, I decided to watch a couple of things I probably wouldn't make the time for otherwise...

48 Hours - WOW is this not only a ridiculously offensive movie, it's also just NOT FUNNY.  It's got the one scene where Eddie is pretty great, and otherwise it's just...it's just bad.  How was this a hit?  Blergh.  90 minutes I'm never getting back.  Lots of familiar faces, though.

The Limey - I vaguely remembered that this existed and for some reason thought it had Pete Postelthwaite instead of Terence Stamp.  Don't know why I thought that.  But it opens very, um, boring 70s/80s action movie for the first 3-4 minutes, and I was thinking to myself, "Wait, Soderbergh directed this, though.  This has GOT to be way nerdier than *this*..." and then the flashbacks and jumps start rolling in heavy, and then you know you're watching the movie you were expecting.  Pretty good but not great, and a lot of the visual & stylistic choices work really well (such as the lighting effects with the car on fire and a few other, similar scenes).  But I really didn't think the ending worked at all.

Spoiler

After he violently murders a small army's worth of people to get to this guy, he just...walks away?  Lets him go?  Buh?  I mean, I get there's supposed to be the parallelism between the two men, but with the way it's shot, it's clear Wilson is supposed to understand, "I created this.  I shaped her to be this way; I shaped her to stand up to him.  She's dead because I seeded her mind with these choices."  So it would have made a lot more sense in my mind if he'd killed himself, but then we cut to the *exact same ending otherwise* with the plane & the archive footage as his last self-serving fantasy before he dies. 

Oh, and the Cockney rhyming slang bits were just lame; if you have to grind the moment to a screeching halt so they can be explained each and every time, just...don't fucking include shit like that.

Edited by Contentious C
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4 hours ago, Web Conn said:

It’s heady at times but also really sweet at other times. I wasn’t expecting that ending but I don’t know if any other ending would have worked. 

A women's revenge movie designed for a male-centric point of view would've had Cassie shoot the bastard in the junk with a 9mm, but this is not Ms. 45 or I Spit On Your Grave. 

This movie is great because Emerald has no blueprint for how this is supposed to go, so she can make her revenge movie with small doses of sweetness, intellect, and passiveness and it still manages to click.

The ending is outstanding and for better or worse, I also don't think it could've gone down any other way.  

My thoughts on other spoilery stuff:

Spoiler

I read in an article that Emerald did research on the average amount of time it takes for someone to die of suffocation, so that is why Cassie's murder seems to drag on forever.   It takes Al two and a half minutes to smother Cassie to death:  the exact amount of time it takes a normal human to die under those circumstances.  Cassie dies in such a way that she is still being treated like a human being.  This hits you in the gut once you figure out what's going on.  I couldn't help but shed a couple of tears once I made the connection.  It is a harsh truth.

Also, Cassie being murdered by Al seems to deliberately drive against the usual vengeance trope.   Cassie is killed by the man that raped Nina.  She does not get her Charles Bronson / Lady Vengeance moment where she gets to gun down all of the vile offenders and have her moment of poetic justice.  She places herself in an incredibly dangerous situation and pays the price for it.  Totally not what anyone expects.  Justice comes because of her efforts and in spite of them.

After Cassie dies, you don't see her face for the rest of the movie.  It is either offscreen or covered by the pillow.  The whole " Cassie is now a faceless and voiceless victim" thing was a bit much for me.  Cassie spends the entire movie trying to speak for Nina, so I don't think I needed to be bludgeoned over the head with the idea that advocacy for the women who have suffered such violence and abuse is an important thing.  I already had the horror of Cassie's murder and Cassie's crusade for Nina to drive that home.

 

Edited by J.T.
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10 hours ago, Raziel said:

I'm wondering if there's another movie that had a good opening then turned into utter shit faster than Mortal Kombat.  Fuck was that bad.

Make for an interesting topic.

There's also shit films with good endings.

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I liked Mortal Kombat. But I'm also not a huge fan of the games or anything, so I don't really care about the complaints I've seen online. Josh Lawson as Kano is definitely the goddamn MVP of the thing, though. I'll give a sequel a try for sure. For as gory and as good as the CGI was, I'm not sure if I like this reboot any more than I did the originals. Those are something special to me, since I was a really little kid when I saw those (and MK on the SNES was one of the first games I remember playing - along with the Power Rangers game).

Although the inclusion of the original character, Cole, is weird. Not sure why Scorpion & Sub-Zero are eternal enemies in this movie either, beyond CLANS~! or whatever, but hey, I get HBO Max with the price of my cable/internet subscription so it's whatever really. Bummed some of these people got killed, but it's Mortal Kombat, not like death is permanent in this franchise.

I'd give it like a 6.5 or 7 if I was forced to give it a rating or whatever. It was pretty fun, I thought.

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It was pretty mid with some good bits thrown in but the acting and writing fell off a cliff after the intro. Holy shit. Cole Young is the absolute shits. Apparently when making the movie they asked themselves what would Marvel do? Stop doing that. Liu Kang dude is a seriously beautiful man and was pretty believable. Like put him in there in place of the create a character protagonist and the movie is instantly better tenfold. 

While I appreciate the focus on Sub Zero as the major antagonist, it felt like half a movie with that ending. I don't really care for modern movies aside from big dumb stuff at this point like Godzilla vs. Kong so I was hyped for this but man... So many bad decisions that put a damper on what should've been a layup. Leg sweep made me laugh.

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Sub-Zero is basically the Terminator in this.  Which is cool and they have a lot of fun with his powers, but he’s built up SO much that every other villain character seems pretty much unnecessary and inconsequential by comparison.  Even Goro!

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5 hours ago, EVA said:

Sub-Zero is basically the Terminator in this.  Which is cool and they have a lot of fun with his powers, but he’s built up SO much that every other villain character seems pretty much unnecessary and inconsequential by comparison.  Even Goro!

Shang Tsung saved all but one of his spots for the sequel, where we'll get an actual tournament. The nice thing about Mortal Kombat bullshit is that nobody is truly ever dead. If there is a sequel, and based on the 2 million google searches it did yesterday I'm guessing it'll get at least one more, there's no way they aren't bringing back undead Kano. Bi-Han will likely be Noob Saibot. 

I was bored this morning after waking up too early yet again, so I looked through twitter for reactions. Cole seems universally disliked. I hope they pivot immediately and Shang Tsung takes his ass out in the first round of the sequel. I'd also really like to see Nightwolf in the flesh and not on a piece of paper. Kotal Kahn too. 

And for all of its flaws, the most important part of the movie was Sub Zero vs. Scorpion and it delivered even with bitch ass Cole in there.

Edited by Jiji
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10 hours ago, EVA said:

If I had to describe MK 2021 in one sentence, it would be:  Kano grows an eye laser because he got mad that Kung Lao wouldn’t pass him an egg roll.

That about sums it up.

That doesn't make any sense. Egg rolls are nasty.

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I don't know, I liked it a lot. I wasn't looking for there to be a tournament or whatever, I just wanted MK characters beating the shit out of each other with fatalities thrown in. And that's what I got. 

Cole does suck though. 

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