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Author Topic: Respond to the last movie you watched  (Read 684735 times)

smirnoff

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #2110 on: March 01, 2018, 08:51:33 PM »
Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2008)        10/10

Ariadne: Why are they all looking at me?
Cobb: Because my subconscious feels that someone else is creating this world. The more you change things, the quicker the projections start to converge on you.
Ariadne: Converge?
Cobb: It's the foreign nature of the dreamer. They attack like white blood cells fighting an infection.
Ariadne: They're going to attack us?
Cobb: No... *under his breath* Just you.

That last little "just you" at the end of that scene was one of my favourite parts of sitting down with this film again. I mean when it's your first time through the film that's one of those foreboding lines which I don't think people in real life would actually verbalize, but in film of course they do, entirely for the audience's benefit. When you're already familiar with the film though and you know exactly what's coming... I had such a big smile when he said it.  The delivery is perfect.

But actually as much as I know what's coming, the intensity of it still surprises me. When Cobb's subconscious does finally turn violent, and Mal comes through the crowd... the way she approaches is like watching the T-1000 come at John in the arcade. It's a kind of menace more powerful than human menace. There's nothing you could say or do to make it flinch or hesitate. It just comes right for you. The time it takes to get there and the inevitability of it make it that much worse. Marion Cotillard manages to capture that. She is a presence that puts you on edge any time she's on screen, but even then I still feel her pain, and the tragedy of the whole situation.

The movie has a general presentation which is quite understated I think, and that's refreshing. For starters, there isn't any shirts-off stuff. No characters are defined by their sexual appeal, or their super human physique. Nor are they defined by their ability to shoot a gun or throw a punch. They are capable in these areas, but it's not a defining trait for any of them. And that makes it that much cooler when for instance Cobb dives for a gun and shoots it all in a flash, or Arthur catches a baddie in a complicated choke hold. The movie doesn't do anything to spotlight these moments, it just happens and carries on. There's no larger than life entrances in this film, and nobody dies in a heroic blaze of glory. As action goes the characters don't relish it and it isn't easy for them. Eames is perhaps the only character who seems to get a degree of enjoyment out of what he does, but even there the film itself never goes out of it's way to amplify that. As an action film it has it's own quiet flavour.

What about as a heist film? I think the film is refreshingly understated there too. This is not Daniel Ocean's assembly of quirky criminals... characters so niche it's as if in writing the script they first decided on the what the target would be, and then reversed engineered the exact steps you would take to steal it, and then created characters to embody each step. "At some point someone will need to hide in a cashbox... okay, so we'll create a character whose sole purpose and contribution is to do that". That's how you get to a bloated 11 man crew. :P The inception crew has some definite jobs to perform (chemistry, architecture, forgery) but in all cases that is only an aspect of what they contribute to the mission. The chemist is sometimes driver, the forger is sometimes muscle, the architect is sometimes the game-planner. They feel like tasks, not roles. And as characters, to me they do not fit any particular cliche ("Nerdy hacker", "gentle giant", "person with an over-the-top-accent", etc). I think the film is better for it.

Also the goal of the heist itself is unlike any other heist film. This is not nuclear codes, crown jewels, rare cars, eggs with sequins on them, artwork, magic orbs or any of that other regular crap, which is why it is annoying when this film gets summarized (dismissively it feels like) as "just a heist movie". As if what this crew were trying to pull off was some ordinary thing. This is a fascinating and difficult objective to wrap your head around... both how to go about it and how to know you've accomplished it at all. It is nothing so pedestrian as breaking into Fort Knox; A task which you can quickly define in your imagination as needing to overcome particular physical obstacles. Walls, guards, location, etc. You say "plant an idea in a CEO's head to break up the company", the scope of what that might entail is not summed up by anything so obvious as walls and guards.

Finally, this film lacks nothing in the emotional department for me at this point. I didn't react so strongly to it in the theatre but that is typical for me. I've never really let myself get emotional surrounded by strangers in a theatre, which hurts the potential of a film and that's my own doing. In the comfort of my own home though this is a sad film and Hans Zimmer's score is in perfect harmony with that. Watching Cobb watch his wife jump off a building is brutal. As an actor I can't think of DiCaprio delivering something so raw and so real as his reaction in that moment. I know it's big acting, wailing, screaming sort of stuff you can scoff at, but it feels pretty damn real in that moment.

                         

Director's Filmography
Inception
Interstellar

The Prestige
The Dark Knight Rises
The Dark Knight

Batman Begins
Dunkirk

Insomnia
Memento

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« Last Edit: March 01, 2018, 08:56:25 PM by smirnoff »

Bondo

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #2111 on: March 01, 2018, 09:40:11 PM »
Battle of the Sexes (2017)

This film and the story it tells is the perfect metaphor for the rigged game that is patriarchy. If Riggs wins, men are declared fundamentally superior to women. But if Billie Jean King wins, it only means that women are worthy of acknowledgment as human beings. By her own accounting, a win is not a declaration of female dominance (because how could it when pitting a has-been male player against the very best woman). But the men around Riggs are certainly going to treat it like it has these damning stakes.

Revisiting this moment in 2017, it is hard not to think of the 2016 election. Donald Trump is nothing if not a bloated, chauvinistic showman, albeit with a malice that Bobby Riggs did not have. He has no legitimate claim to being the best. Meanwhile he was pitted against the most qualified female politician in history, nay, strike the female, simply one of the most qualified politicians. If politics were played out like a tennis match, Hillary Clinton would have won in straight sets like King did. Unfortunately politics is not a game of skill as such, though electioneering I suppose is a type of skill. But in this case all those angry white men (and too often their obliging white spouses, we should remember that Margaret Court is a horrible political figure in her own right), treating the election as if a single female politician would be the end of men rather than just a chance for women to match men, stormed the electoral process and played the rigged game to keep their power. We can only hope that 2016 was Riggs-Court and our political Billie Jean King is yet to come.

Anyway, as a film, this is well made and enjoyable to watch, though if I'm honest, I'd rather watch the documentary from the past few years that was made but doesn't seem to have been made available.

smirnoff

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #2112 on: March 01, 2018, 09:42:51 PM »
Gilbert (Neil Berkeley, 2017)        10/10

I didn't expect this. Even as a fan of his podcast I wasn't in a rush to see it, though it's been available of Prime for a while. I guess I just figured I knew what it would be. And actually I was right. It was a straight-forward bio-doc of a still living comedian. It has a mix of talking head interviews from fellow comedians and family, some archival footage of his life and stand-up act, and then some present day stuff where the camera follows him around doing everyday things. So in that sense it wasn't a surprise at all. What surprised me is how much I enjoyed it!

I don't think I've ever had tears of laughter so closely chased by real tears, and vice versa. Gilbert's podcast has endeared me to him, and this documentary took that to another level. This from a guy who, if you only knew him as "that voice", might be the last person you'd want to spend more time listening to.

It's a tough recommendation because I don't know how much a person's opinion of his comedy or their current opinion of him might influence their experience with the doc. From the unfiltered excerpts of his comedy in this documentary, and his large, easy laugh on his podcast, personally I do find him really funny in his own crazy way. I think maybe because I never find him to be mean-spirited, regardless of what he's joking about.

I think I would actually recommend listening to the most recent In Memoriam episode of his podcast if you're looking for a way in. It's a great episode and a nice tribute to a lot of names, but they also discuss this documentary in way that I think enhances it.
                         

Director's Filmography
Gilbert

Beauty Is Embarrassing
Harmontown

1SO

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #2113 on: March 01, 2018, 10:45:24 PM »
Inception is my 3rd favorite film of this decade, and even though I jumped off the fanboy train the film has never suffered because of it. I'm already preparing myself for 2020 when I share this with anyone asking for my list of the decade's best. Many will roll their eyes and assume Nolan's other films from the 10s must be lurking nearby.


Bondo, glad you got to Battle of the Sexes, though I expected you to comment more on the film emphasizing King's sexual identity over the battle with Riggs. It's what I think takes away from the film's success, but that approach I can see being more to your liking. As for Hillary, the GOP and congress was rigged in such a way that if she had won it would've been brutal to watch them go after her with a combination of real concerns and inflated molehills. The only way it would've all worked out is if HRC had been in charge these past eight years followed by President Obama, who can take on anything the GOP can go at him with.


I always like Gilbert Gottfried, but you're right, the Podcast makes him even more likable while never turning down the volume on his particular obsessions and habits. (I love that he still gets guests who know nothing of the Ceasar Romero story, letting Gilbert tell it again. He never tires of repeating the story and for the listener it becomes about anticipating the guest's reaction.)

smirnoff

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #2114 on: March 01, 2018, 11:17:37 PM »
Inception is my 3rd favorite film of this decade, and even though I jumped off the fanboy train the film has never suffered because of it. I'm already preparing myself for 2020 when I share this with anyone asking for my list of the decade's best. Many will roll their eyes and assume Nolan's other films from the 10s must be lurking nearby.

:)) One does feel rather defensive liking Inception this much. I hear ya.

Bondo

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #2115 on: March 02, 2018, 06:06:08 AM »
Bondo, glad you got to Battle of the Sexes, though I expected you to comment more on the film emphasizing King's sexual identity over the battle with Riggs. It's what I think takes away from the film's success, but that approach I can see being more to your liking.

It wasn't what felt like the dominant frame but certainly something that I could comment about. I'm not sure it really develops the relationship enough to function as a romance so I could concur about it taking away a little. That said, I think Austin Stowell in some ways sells the relationship stuff the best, along with the end text noting how they reformed their new respective families after they divorced and remained very much connected. I think he does a great job responding to the developing awareness of this other relationship.

I'm hitting a bit of a turning point where I can be a bit prickly about LGBT depictions. The trailer for Love Simon has me annoyed because it's this HS drama about being in the closet that seems to be set in the present, in suburban Atlanta, and I'm like 2017, just be out dude. But obviously I have even less patience for intolerance of really any consensual sexuality at this point because it just seems like it should be so obvious that love is love. Like, the world is intense and chaotic and why can't we at least agree to be happy about people who find private happiness.

P.S. I think we all need more Alan Cumming in our lives.

Teproc

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #2116 on: March 02, 2018, 08:25:16 AM »
The Shape of Water (Guillermo de Toro, 2017)

A film that keeps going down in my estimation the more I think about it. Watching it, I enjoyed it, the performances are strong across the board, Desplat's score is excellent and it looks quite good. But I feels like del Toro playing in his sandbox, having fun with his toys (see also: "snow globe movie", per The Next Picture Show) but never quite getting to anything bigger than that. Well, that's not quite true: the scene in which Richard Jenkins speaks aloud for Sally Hawkins is something, it doesn't wash over you (insert water joke here) like the rest of the film does... and again, it's too well-made and well-acted to be unenjoyable, but even its more ostentatious sequences like the musical scene or the sex scene (set to Madeleine Peyroux's cover of La Javanaise, I can't disapprove there) never quite manage to elevate the film to anything more than "eh, that was nice".

6/10
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Teproc

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #2117 on: March 02, 2018, 12:03:04 PM »
I, Tonya (Craig Gillespie, 2017)

Watching this in the context of Oscar season (which is January to March here, with more or less two major Oscar contenders coming out in theaters every week) really underlines the film's most important quality, which is its energy. There is a vitality, an enthusiasm to the filmmaking here that makes some of the script's roughest edges easier to forgive. This is a messy film, which - even putting aside the massive tonal shifts it goes through - asks us to believe in Margot Robbie and Sebastian Stan as 16-year old for a second there. It... doesn't work. Robbie is a bit of a strange casting choice generally, mostly because of her age, which is pretty relevant here given Tonya's relative immaturity is a pretty key element to her character... but she's so good it doesn't matter too much in the end.

It's not just about the performance though. Certainly, Robbie helps a lot with the tonal shifts, especially the domestic violence. What the film asks us, really, is to espouse her point of view as much as possible, and as such, violence is part of the film but it doesn't define it, because she doesn't want it to define her. She can't escape it entirely, as much as she tries, and that's what makes her a tragic character... how much that has to do with the real Tonya Harding I don't know, and frankly I don't care. As presented here, she's as fascinating as she is entertaining, to the point that the film does lose a bit of momentum once it gets to the "incident". Ostensibly, that should be the big payoff, and it does work well as some kind of a farcical tragedy, but the film does lose some of its focus as Tonya herself is sidelined.

Still, it does come back to her, and the scene in which she attempts to endict the whole audience feels like an encapsulation of her character, of how hard it is to settle on her: is she the kind of person that would do that ? Though the film gives a somewhat generous version of events for her, it clearly doesn't expect us to take it a face value, and that ambiguity works very well here.

8/10
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Junior

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #2118 on: March 02, 2018, 02:24:49 PM »
Yeah, I, Tonya has stuck with me because of that energy. While I agree that the movie loses a little steam after "the incident," I'm glad that it maintains a sense of humor throughout.
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pixote

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #2119 on: March 02, 2018, 05:32:34 PM »
I, Tonya is +3300 to win an Oscar for its editing. I hope it wins (because I'll win, too).

Too bad it was robbed in the Filmspots.

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