I came to watching Upgrade, or as you will guess about half way through, originally titled STEM, looking for a dumb action movie. I had thought dumb was right as I groaned at the trope of needing revenge over a murdered girlfriend but there's more too the story than this. The action is great, using a cool camera trick to follow STEM as it fights. In many ways the action sequences reminded me of Atomic Blonde in that they are more low tech, no massive explosions, close in and panicked but not shaky and unwatchable.
I watched and re-watched a bunch of Coen Brothers's movies in preparation for a Coen Brothers trivia night (we came in third!)
Burn After Reading and Hail Caesar are hilarious. Fargo is, well, Fargo - it's required viewing if you live in Minnesota - though everyone I know who sounds like that is actually from Wisconsin.
O Brother Where Art Thou is really fun. Great music.
I got a monthly Prime video-only subscription to catch up on some recentish movies I didn't get to see in the theaters.
Hereditary is really good. I sort of didn't care so much for the ending, but I think it might just be me, because of a specific type of thing I don't like.
The Florida Project was excellent. It's by the same guy who did Tangerine, and it has that same type of realism to it as well. It has Willem Dafoe in it, which I thought would detract more from the realistic qualify, but it didn't too much, and he was good in it. Probably not as good as the kid, though. She was great. It's bleak, but not melodramatic about it.
You Were Never Really Here was excellent, too. It's a sort of slow-burn crime thriller, I guess, directed by Lynne Ramsay, who is brilliant. (She also made Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar, and We Need to Talk about Kevin.) It's got a lot of character development kind of detail that a lot of people didn't like, but I do, and Lynne Ramsay is probably the best at the sort of tense drama with just a little touch of magical realism, bent reality in there. Recommended.
I also watched an old one, The Swimmer with Burt Lancaster. I've had this on my gowatchit queue for years now, and then, it just dropped on Amazon right after I got the subscription. It was also really good! It became apparent what was happening in the story by about the halfway point, I think, but the way it played the story arc on all these different levels was beautifully done. PS You see Burt Lancaster's entire butt at one point, and his package is prominently silhouetted throughout. Not bad!
The Florida Project was excellent. It's by the same guy who did Tangerine, and it has that same type of realism to it as well. It has Willem Dafoe in it, which I thought would detract more from the realistic qualify, but it didn't too much, and he was good in it. Probably not as good as the kid, though. She was great. It's bleak, but not melodramatic about it.
I just saw this about a week ago - it's a great movie. And the actress playing Moonie was fabulous.
Saw the documentary Icarus, which starts out as the filmmaker wanting to try doping for a bike race and see if he could get away with it to demonstrate how easy it is to do and how much improvement you can get, etc.
But the American doctor/scientist dropped out because as a former drug testing official, he didn't want the risk to his reputation, but puts him in contact with a Russian scientist instead.
But that guy turns out to be at the center of the Russian doping scandal, and the documentary then eventually turns into this guy fleeing to the US because he's afraid he'll be killed by Putin due to the doping scandal, and then giving tons of evidence to the government and NY Times, etc. and becomes more like a spy movie about how Russia did all their cheating.
Very engaging, even for someone like me who doesn't care that much about sports. Won the Oscar for best documentary.
(Also, how fucking lucky was this guy that his movie about him doing a Super Size Me for doping in bike races turns into a movie about massive conspiracies, cheating, Putin, KGB, defectors and helping to get Russia banned from the Olympics?)
A Danish Thriller about a police officer working as an alarm dispatcher who gets a call from a panicked woman who claims to have been kidnapped.
Watching someone talking on the phone for 90 minutes. This is truly excellent!
Oh Lucy!
This one's from Japan. A lonely office lady falls in love with her English teacher (Josh Hartnett). When he disappears she leaves for the US to find him.
Crazy, sweet, sad, funny. Wonderful!
Keep an Eye Out (Au Poste!)
And off to France for this one. An absurd, surrealist comedy by Quentin Dupieux. Completely insane and very funny.
And a couple of American movies to finish:
Thoroughbreds
Two rich, entitled teenage girls are bored: The movie.
Holy shit. Holy fucking shit.
You Were Never Really Here
Joaquin Phoenix plays a traumatised veteran who tracks down missing girls. Ultra-violent and Phoenix mumbles a lot (A LOT) so I had to turn on subtitles.
Still, what a movie and what a performance!
Honorable mentions:
A Star is Born - Lady Gaga is phenomenal.
Hereditary - lisapea already told you.
Madeline's Madeline was fantastic. The title card is super-deceptive, making it look like a comedy, which is why I didn't watch it sooner. It is not a comedy, though. It's a very disconcerting story about a mentally ill girl getting involved with a theater troupe and, um, stuff. I'll bet people who watch it expecting a comedy end up pretty disappointed.
And here is the thing where I told not you but some other people so: The director, Josephine Decker, has made a couple other feature films that I thought were horribly underrated, and I've been predicting for a while that she was going to keep getting even better until people couldn't ignore her anymore. (I think maybe it's a gender thing, maybe, because most of the people underrating her are men and I'm not getting what they're not getting.)
Anyway, this one seems to be getting there. I keep seeing it in Best of 2018 lists, and it's winning awards in the little independent things and stuff. This worried me a little because I thought maybe that meant it was a real departure from what I liked about her earlier movies, but it wasn't.
I want to avoid spoiling, but I really loved it, for what that's worth.
(Coincidentally, the movie I watched just before that was Bo Burnham's Eighth Grade, so it's coming of age week, I guess. That was also very good, and I recommend it too.)
How to Train your Dragon III The Hidden World is a good solid film. Nothing new or amazing story wise, you've heard it before, you won't be surprised by any of it, but it's also a well done version of stories and themes you've heard before.
As a stand alone film I probably wouldn't rate it as high, but it's not a stand alone film and it knows it. It's banking on you having enjoyed your previous outings with the crew and their dragons and you want to know more about them or at least hang out with them. In that way it succeeds, and is quite enjoyable.
If I had one complaint it's that the dialog clearly got a few work overs with at least one person thinking 'eh, they're teenagers, young adults, make them sound more like teenagers to appeal to the teenagers' and there's a couple lines that just would never have been said like that by those characters.
The pretty traditional ending would have annoyed me if it wasn't for the fact that this closes out the series and I'll take a traditional ending if it means no How to Train your dragon 6 Toothless goes to Hollywood.
ETA: And I don't think it needs to be said, especially if you've seen the trailers, but I'll add that the film is gorgeous. It's ever as pretty as it looks to be in clips you've seen. There are a couple Avatar world moments where you kinda just wanna step outside of all the story and just wander around and pick grass, maybe have a staring contest with a frog dragon, leave all that emotional story stuff behind, ewww dragon slobber looks gross, it's awesome!
It's something else, let me tell you. I loved the feel of GET OUT. It was personal and intimate and terrifying. Us is another level. I'm still processing it. I feel like GET OUT was easier to "get" on just one viewing, but still very satisfying with subsequent watches. Us, to me, feels like it demands a couple of watches. But maybe that's just me trying to figure out the in world and cultural perspective(s) and/or commentary (-ies) in the work itself.
But looking at it as "just a movie," it's still plenty good. An excellent addition from the budding filmmaker. It's p straight forward. Here's this fambly. Here's this weird thing happening to them. Oh, and it gets weirder and oh golly now it's violent and scary and ... okay, wtf is going on. And what happens after that is totes spoiler territory you gotta see it to believe it.
Oh and I forgotted the most important part of the movie. Not a real spoiler for the events. Just making an extra step for the surprise reveal. Mr Peele is no doubt a fan of one of our members here at the . Obviously, he couldn't give us a blatant shout out, that would be like linking to us -which is strictly forboden.
I love Aubrey Plaza too much to be objective about this, so grain of salt, but I loved it!
As erimir said in another thrad:
Quote:
Originally Posted by erimir
There were some fairly funny moments, but it's a bit too heavy on the cringe-y side of things for it to be very enjoyable.
It was painfully cringey throughout. Like, that was the whole premise of the movie, which I totally get off on that. A podcaster that I like and who has excellent taste in film said something along the lines of "That movie was basically a 2-hour panic attack for me". That sold me on it and I had to watch it immediately. Did not disappoint!
Oh, also, it's streamable on Hulu right now for no extra charge.
The Heartbreak Kid with Josh Groban, the 1972 version. Not the 2007 version which they both were pissed off was being made
Charles Grodin, you probably mean. I'm pretty sure Josh Groban hadn't been born yet.
Elaine May's directing career was pretty much torpedoed by Ishtar, so it's a little extra mean that someone decided to remake one of the few movies she was able to direct.
And another time for the young 'uns: ISHTAR WAS NOT A TERRIBLE FILM! FUCK EVERYONE!
__________________
"Her eyes in certain light were violet, and all her teeth were even. That's a rare, fair feature: even teeth. She smiled to excess, but she chewed with real distinction." - Eleanor of Aquitaine
I've never seen it, but from what I can tell, it started out as some kind of disgruntlement about the budget or the schedule or something, and that just sort of transmogrified into some common belief that it was a bad movie, and then it just became a sort of thing people say.
I've been meaning to watch it sometime to judge for myself, but I believe you.
I'm still working on my deeper thoughts about what Us means on the more deeper level. Movie critic Aaron Dicer (who works with the Cinema Sins guys) had these thoughts in a recent podcast.
Quote:
The themes that I saw throughout the movie have to do with our country. I don't think that it's any mistake that one of the characters says that we are Americans. It's no mistake that Us is also U.S. I think this very much has to do with a feelling that has been creeping inside of me of I can't do anything about our Us vs Them mentality. And the idea that you have to draw sides on everything. And you have to hate the people who are on the other side. That is something he is saying here. When you divide, you are saying look at those people, look at me. The point that the kid says when you point your finger you have three- four pointing back at yourself. That's the whole theme of the movie. We are us. All of us. And these seperations that we make are unhealthy and they're harmful and the more we can do to empathize with each other the better off we're going to be as human beings.
You guys, this is so important. I had heard that this was really good, a must-watch, but as far as I knew it was just another entry into the Spider-Man branch of the MCU. Sure, Homecoming was good, and I definitely would have gotten around to watching this one at some point (I mean, obviously, because I did). But I didn't know.
This is different. It's not a "superhero movie" per se. It's completely a concept-piece, a labor of love from a group of insanely talented artists. It's astonishing that it even got made, given how expensive it obviously was, but I guess once they were in, they were all in. It's the kind of thing that only comes along once in a million movies, due to its high cost-to-mainstream-appeal ratio.
If you're into art or comic books or computer graphics or drugs, watch it. They did it with 3D models, CGI, motion capture, that kind of stuff. But then old-school animators and comic book artists went on and hand-drew 2D cartoons over the top of the 3D pictures. It's like Sleeping Beauty, in that they are like "lets spend tons of money and resources and time on making something beautiful and unprecedented, and maybe the public will notice or maybe they won't, but who cares because that's not the point."
It's also a cute fun story with lots of good messages and representation, and in plenty of other films that alone would have made it worth watching. But this thing is so visually compelling, so straight-up mind-blowing, that I can't even.
We saw High Life yesterday, and loved it. And the more I think about it, the more I love it and think I want to see it again. It's pretty heavily allegorical, but not like a direct substitution cipher. More in drawing on common archetypes and universal themes. And not the hero's journey.
I try not to read about movies I'm going to see beforehand, so today, I went and looked around to see what other people had said about it, and WTF. It's like some of them were watching a completely different movie. A lot of the reviews I've seen have barely even mentioned what I had thought was the one big obvious theme, and I'm just going to say: They're wrong lol, and no offense, but I'm suspecting that some of them are men or something. I'm always keeping my mouth shut about man directors like Godard and Linklater because I figure it is some dude thing and the fact that I'm not into it doesn't mean it's not good and I'm probably missing something about it, but it's funny how some people are confidently talking about this movie as though nothing is happening or the plot is vague and confused in the parts that are central to the theme. A lot of the things they're calling nonsensical are pretty important parts.
L.O.L. MANS AND MAN ADJACENTS. I'll bet they all liked mother! though.
Re: Seen Any Good Movies...?
. Obviously, he couldn't give us a blatant shout out, that would be like linking to us -which is strictly forboden.
...........
It's the kind of thing that only comes along once in a million movies, due to its high cost-to-mainstream-appeal ratio.
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