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Author Topic: Respond to the last movie you watched  (Read 684083 times)

Eric/E.T.

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #5750 on: April 09, 2021, 11:18:33 PM »
The Trial of the Chicago 7
The most meaningful part of this is actually the title cards at the end. This film is more of a political spectacle than anything I can take too seriously, a superhero movie without the silly costumes, but the path Jerry Rubin took is clarifying. He sold out. So did most everyone else in that generation. I did read just a tad on David Dellinger, maybe he was OK.

This viewing correlates to the extra prickliness in other comments. I don't know how many more political spectacles passed down to us from our masters at Netflix and HBO I can take. Maybe it's Hollywood. I honestly think I need a break to recalibrate what I actually think about anything anymore.
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Sam the Cinema Snob

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #5751 on: April 10, 2021, 05:52:25 PM »
I thought about waiting and writing something longer but honestly, I've got too much to do in the next week and I'm behind on my other writing projects:

Soul (2020)

Best Pixar movie since Ratatouille. I love the after/beforelife stuff and how the 2D managerial figures and integrated into the 3D world. Its representation reminded me of C.S. Lewis' description of heaven in The Great Divide where everything is hyper-real to the point it can't be felt. The animation here is so playful and stylized in a way that makes me appreciate the computer generated graphics for once.

I worried about the Brave-like turn when Joe gets stuck in the body of a cat early on, but it works surprisingly well because we also get 22 who is a soul whose never had a body inside Joe's body getting to experience all the sensations of what it's like to have a body. What could have just been stupid, childish hijinks for laughs comes across as a profound, sensory experience of what it means to be an embodied soul, how our physical reality impacts our spiritual being.

I joked back when they announced this project that it was going to be Gnosticism the movie (a religious belief that the spiritual world is better than the physical world), but this film actually does a great job of showing the pleasures of both physical and spiritual existence and while I obviously don't think ever single detail is how it really is, it's obviously shaping the world to tell this story.

And, of course, I love all the Jazz stuff. It reminded me of Kids on the Slope with the painstaking detail to the fingerwork of the players here. Add in the visual flourishes of the animation and it's a sensory delight to experience the expressiveness of jazz.

Most Pixar films post Ratatouille I've seen once and felt ambivalent or worse on. I've seen Wall-E several times and really only dig everything up until the humans. Incredibles 2 I've seen several times and is okay, but more because I get to spend more time with characters I like and less because the plot is any good (it isn't). I do need to double back and see Onward. I patently refuse to watch Cars 2/3. Soul is so good I could see myself owning it and watching it once a year or so. It's that good.

Still, it's no Mind Game.

1SO

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #5752 on: April 10, 2021, 06:55:26 PM »
I had to research Inside Out, the director's last film and for most the best Pixar of the 2010s. Thought maybe it slipped your mind, but actually you agree with me about that film's flaws.


Eric, you want movies to do too much. Netflix (actually Paramount) and Aaron Sorkin are trying to entertain you first. Sorkin is a student of the classical style of storytelling. He admits he knew nothing about the Chicago 7 when Spielberg first approached him years ago. He found books and a living witness and learned from them enough to craft his story. He doesn't claim to be a scholar on the subject, but he knows how to write characters and dialogue.

Will

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #5753 on: April 11, 2021, 05:43:43 PM »
Kushner would’ve had a better handling than Sorkin on that material. It still wouldn’t be perfect but it would be a bit less cornball and a lot less self-satisfied/smarmy.

Sorkin should stick to stories about media moguls or biopics. Yes I know he did political movies and television first but he’s better when he pivoted towards the lightly apolitical.
« Last Edit: April 11, 2021, 05:45:41 PM by Will »

1SO

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #5754 on: April 12, 2021, 08:32:44 AM »

Love and Monsters (2020)
”I really didn’t have your typical upbringing. I mean,
I did at first and then the world ended.”

A giant monster rom-com with the cheeky attitude of Zombieland, the pandemic has turned this Paramount Picture (originally slated for a wide release) into a gem waiting to be discovered. It popped on my radar when it was Oscar Nominated for Best Visual Effects, which lead me to a slew of positive reviews that I agree with. The high concept idea is easily the best script from Brian Duffield (The Babysitter, Underwater) and Matthew Robinson (Monster Trucks, Dora and the Lost City of Gold). It’s like each writer knows how to fix the other one’s flaws, creating a smooth, serviceable, well-plotted ride of PG-13 scares and cheers.

Dylan O’Brien (The Maze Runner) takes the Michael Cera lovable loser mold and removes the annoying whiney tics. Along the way he runs into Michael Rooker, but the real scene-stealer is a terrific dog. For anyone worried about the dog he’s often in danger, but never killed or even injured. The creatures aren’t Oscar caliber, but they work in a scrappy, efficient way. This should be on everybody’s watchlist come Shocktober!
RATING: ★ ★ ★ – Good

Bondo

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #5755 on: April 12, 2021, 10:53:35 AM »
To me Dylan O'Brien here screamed budget Adam Brody. Like, that general vibe but with less charisma. On the whole I was pretty unimpressed by the film.

Let Them All Talk

I suppose outside the setting of a Caribbean cruise, maybe cruise liner travel is actually a lot more chill. That was certainly an overwhelming impression watching the trip that Meryl Streep et al take here as Alice Hughes (Streep), averse to air travel, sets sail to England to receive an exclusive book award, all while being pressed by her agent about her next book. The ship always gives the impression of being at 25% capacity with party atmosphere limited to evenings in one solitary event hall. It all seems preferable to my experience of constant party that had me spending more time in my cabin reading.

After something like 12 years of mostly finding Streep overrated in big, mannered performances getting tons of award recognition, it is this one that got none of that attention that I really connected with. There is one scene where a discovery might be expected to send her into rage surprises by having her use her perceptive authorial sense of character to get to the heart of the matter and to respond instead with empathy. As has often been the case with the more acclaimed performances, I did find the film around Streep's performance a little underdeveloped. And my general aversion to Lucas Hedges also continues. I don't even know what it is.

Quo Vadis, Aida?

This dramatization of the Srebrenica Massacre during the 90s Balkan conflicts is, I suppose, a harsh indictment of UN Peacekeeping inability to keep peace. Back in the late 90s, the US's ultimate intervention in the Balkans was cited as a positive example of military capacity to stand up for human rights (albeit contrasted with the failure to do so in Rwanda). This confidence has been completely demolished by the subsequent efforts on the Arabian peninsula and in Northern Africa. This fragmented history leaves me uncertain how to respond to watching other than kind of a resigned frustration with the imperfection of man. Sometimes life is a wrong answers only internet meme.

Junior

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #5756 on: April 15, 2021, 10:55:29 AM »
Mikey and Nicky

An incredible movie that's hard to like but easy to admire. A tale of warped male friendship and toxic masculinity that nonetheless allows you to hate and love the titular characters simultaneously (an Elaine May specialty). The opening, graveyard scenes, street confrontation, and ending will stick with me for a long long time. Cassavettes is great here, channeling the manic energy that dominates his own films, while Falk masterfully plays the sadness, the tiredness, and the love his character has for his oldest friend. An instant masterpiece.

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Eric/E.T.

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #5757 on: April 16, 2021, 11:32:10 PM »
Started as two quick takes, ended up longer, so I didn't really edit this. I hope it's OK.

Shiva Baby
This has my type of raunchy, somewhat random, and irreverent humor. I think for how seriously I take certain issues, I can take a well-meaning joke on anything. "You look like Gwyneth Paltrow on food stamps," while certainly cutting and body-shaming, nevertheless cracked me up. There is also a ton going on here as far as identity politics is concerned, and the depth this film manages to cover on issues of gender and bisexuality is pretty great. While there is the primary character, Danielle, and then her former female love interest, Maya,  who are both incredibly important, the third woman, the entrepreneur and wife of the primary's sugar daddy, Kim, who is the one that actually makes all the money, is complex and ultimately sympathetic in a way a lot of blonde power players are not. Actor Dianna Agron takes advantage of this smaller role and shines as much as Rachel Sennott and Molly Gordon in the lead and larger supporting roles. Read some fan reactions comparing it to the intensity of Uncut Gems, but considering I think I hardly breathed during UG, it didn't quite hit that level, but is nevertheless captivating throughout its relatively short run time. One of the best I've seen from 2021 so far, along with the next selection.

Stray
A Kedi companion? Not quite, as this work on the dogs of Istanbul and surrounding areas eschews the interviews and direct human insights for a dog's eye view of the city. (No disrespect to Kedi, really like that one, too.) While I love dogs, movies about them are hardly a shoe-in. It's the stylistic accomplishment of this film that most moves me. The ambient noise of the city is captured quite vividly, and the camera manages to get in close to the animals and produces brilliant tracking and POV shots where you feel you are seeing the world from their level at all times. Obviously, we are making many more inferences and having much different reactions than the animals; the point is not understanding the world as animals do, just seeing it. I'll be damned if that's not a major purpose of films that matter. As the film proceeds, we see the primary subjects, a trio of dogs, but most particularly a female named Zeytin, often around a group of children refugees from Syria stumble around the city huffing glue and begging for money. We find they are from Aleppo, the subject of two Oscar nominated documentaries from 2020, The Cave and For Sama, and if you have seen those features, you know the dire straits that area is in from the Syrian civil war. There are title cards fairly evenly spread out in the film with quotes, primarily from Diogenes, that comment on the "work" and role of dogs in society, almost making them sound as if they are both sounding boards for philosophers, noble beasts, and social workers. There are no interviews or voiceovers, just the movement of the dogs, a bit of history via title cards at the beginning and end on the struggle of the people on behalf of stray dogs over a century, with the timely and basically perfect application of an effective, minimalist score. I went into this one expecting to like it, same as I go into basically all films, but this could easily be a top ten pick for 2021, and that I did not expect.

Godzilla v. Kong
Not having seen the previous three films from the MonsterVerse, I didn't know what to expect, besides that two giant creatures were about to throw down (obviously). While I'm not usually taken in by visual effects, this one will likely earn my FYC, as I feel they want maximalist with the details on Godzilla and Kong with ever hair follicle and ridge and wrinkle, and made it work. I was pleased that this one didn't have any excessive flag-waving or other trappings of films that purport to be escapist, but still end up pulling us into some Cold War-era or Holocaust-like struggle, though I also wouldn't call it apolitical after having thought about and reading into a little more. The monsters stomping through Hong Kong has to have some level of significance to their struggle for democracy, though nothing overt whatsoever. It's also not hard to read in a critique on the more savage tendencies of capitalism gone wild as seen through the entrepreneur who becomes consumed with a god complex that leads him to creating a sort of neo-Mechagodzilla that embodies the megalomaniacal tendencies of the worst members of our species. I like stories where characters on supposed opposing ends realize who the real enemies really are. Gives me just a drop of hope for humanity, even if these are "just" giant monsters.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters
This was worth seeing just for the character designs of King Ghidorah, Mothra, Rodon, and the other monsters. Wish we would've gotten more mammoth mammoth! This one is otherwise too militaristic, too dumb on questions of human nature, with the odd eco-terrorist bogeyman that doesn't really exist as at least a secondary concern. I find myself constantly awed by megafauna, both extinct and still-present, so I think the MonsterVerse is an easy point of entry into modern blockbusters for someone who doesn't really care for them on the whole. I loved dinos growing up, love reading about and watching whales, so it's not terribly surprising I'm into Godzilla and all the others that make an appearance here. Also to note, I did catch the significance of Serizawa as a Japanese man reviving Godzilla with a nuke, it might be a little heavy-handed, but it's generally good to have a callback to an original series that had so much political significance in its heyday. Still, the current MonsterVerse carries maybe not even an echo of what the first Godzilla (which I've read about quite a bit over the last week, but still haven't seen) was trying to do.




Eric, you want movies to do too much. Netflix (actually Paramount) and Aaron Sorkin are trying to entertain you first. Sorkin is a student of the classical style of storytelling. He admits he knew nothing about the Chicago 7 when Spielberg first approached him years ago. He found books and a living witness and learned from them enough to craft his story. He doesn't claim to be a scholar on the subject, but he knows how to write characters and dialogue.

I want movies to do justice to their subject matter, and I think there's a lot of films out there that take important historical events and do just that. I don't claim to fully understand what makes something generally entertaining, but if the goal is engaging and witty dialogue, big characters, and fast, alluring edits and montages, I don't know why it simultaneously has to include a historical event so difficult to interpret and present in a just manner. To me, The Trial of the Chicago is exploitative of both the moment in history and our emotions. At the end of the day, we end up cheering for a bunch of individuals who don't really deserve it, and one especially troubling character, the Joseph Gordon-Levitt prosecutor, is humanized in a manner he truly doesn't deserve.

I'll also say that in my own personal battles - internal and external - I have a great deal of trouble dealing with how the Boomers sold out our whole world, and don't think it's fertile ground for a political spectacle. I find Judas and the Black Messiah problematic for many of the same reasons as stated above, but I find it did justice to the plight of the Panthers, while Chicago 7 mostly forgets the actual problem of that political moment, the Vietnam War (except what are to me token moments in the beginning and end).
« Last Edit: April 17, 2021, 01:10:56 AM by Eric/E.T. »
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Eric/E.T.

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #5758 on: April 17, 2021, 01:17:18 AM »
Quo Vadis, Aida?

This dramatization of the Srebrenica Massacre during the 90s Balkan conflicts is, I suppose, a harsh indictment of UN Peacekeeping inability to keep peace. Back in the late 90s, the US's ultimate intervention in the Balkans was cited as a positive example of military capacity to stand up for human rights (albeit contrasted with the failure to do so in Rwanda). This confidence has been completely demolished by the subsequent efforts on the Arabian peninsula and in Northern Africa. This fragmented history leaves me uncertain how to respond to watching other than kind of a resigned frustration with the imperfection of man. Sometimes life is a wrong answers only internet meme.

I can feel this. This movie actually missed me to an extent, as I think it wants to be an intimate look through the eyes of a local who is playing a larger part, though isn't privileged to the point that she can even take care of her family during this crisis, while also trying to have us understand the situation at a more global or partially zoomed-out level. The latter aim is what takes this to a "That's too bad"/SMH level that I've traditionally associated with Oscar nominations, and I don't know where that really gets us. I get the frustration, I have it as well, but I don't really need a film to exacerbate that feeling in such a direct way.
A witty saying proves nothing. - Voltaire

Bondo

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #5759 on: April 17, 2021, 05:40:39 AM »
Glad you’re on the Shiva Baby train with 1SO and I. I don’t remember if I used an Uncut Gems comparison but I did put my review in the Shocktober thread if you want a symbol of how i felt its nervous energy. At this point it sits as my top 2021 film.

 

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