I was supposed to see it on Monday but wound up working my butt off around my and my mom's houses instead. We are supposed to see it next Monday and the waiting is really starting to get to me.
__________________
"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
I was supposed to see it on Monday but wound up working my butt off around my and my mom's houses instead. We are supposed to see it next Monday and the waiting is really starting to get to me.
I'm in the same boat. I can't wait to see it
But we're waiting until the girls come back for Christmas....
Really, though, Kael is 100% correct. They both deserve to be seen on the big screen.
I gave my thoughts on Arrivalelsewhere (though it's mostly spoiler tagged, IIRC). Rogue One is also great. It's quite a bit different than most other Star Wars films; the third act in particular has the feel of a WWII/Vietnam war film more than space opera. But that's fine. It's a fun story with great characters, solid acting, great cinematography, great effects, a great soundtrack. Basically everything one could want from a Star Wars film, and as Sack said, it's the prequel that should've been made in the first place.
__________________
Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
I wasn't put off by the Tarkin. The only time it was really noticeable was when he was speaking. That's where a lot of the "real people" CGI goes wrong. I was more creeped by the cameo at the end of the movie and that person barely spoke. Though that person did look a lot like who that person was supposed to look like.
My heaviest critique about the fillum was p much in the beginning. There was a lot of planet hopping. But I guess they had to set the stage somehow.
But as I said, sort of: This is the Star Wars movie I've been wanting for a long time. None of that nonsense about galaxy impacting famblies and their stupid legacies. No Force powers. Just a story about the ordinary people who are asked to and accomplish extraordinary things or have that shit thrust at them and they have to deal or die.
But as I said, sort of: This is the Star Wars movie I've been wanting for a long time. None of that nonsense about galaxy impacting famblies and their stupid legacies. No Force powers. Just a story about the ordinary people who are asked to and accomplish extraordinary things or have that shit thrust at them and they have to deal or die.
It was like an All Star cast of ridiculous sidekicks assembled into a team that might also have been called "The Baddest Motherfuckers With Nothing to Lose in the Galaxy." It was like having all the A-Team archetypes and Starbuck (new and old). Even the C-3P0 knockoff was jacked up on awesome pills.
And naturally, the blind guy couldn't not roll a 20.
__________________
Peering from the top of Mount Stupid
In a movie with a great number of easter eggs one of my favorites was how Chirrut Imwe was described as a former Guardian of the Whills. A very nerdy, somewhat obscure reference.
Both Arrival and Rogue One are well worth seeing. I'd see Arrival first, simply because it may not be in the theaters much longer. You know perfectly well that Rogue One will still be in the theaters 'til well after Christmas, though.
As for Rogue One, it's almost worth the price of admission just to see the last 10 minutes or so of the film. The whole movie is good, but Darth Vader in action is just pure, undiluted awesome!
__________________
“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
La La Land is a very nearly perfect film until the last seven minutes, which I will discuss in a minute. I was ambivalent about the ending while still in the theatre, and the more I think about it and fridge logic sets in, the more I come out absolutely hating it. But I'll get to that later. The film is beautifully shot (in Cinemascope) with an absolutely stellar soundtrack, some of the best performances I've seen this year, and overall, despite an unsatisfying ending, is probably the single best film I've seen all year. It's single-handedly revitalised the musical genre, and it certainly deserves the accolades it's been receiving.
The only (relatively minor) flaw with the work as a whole, apart from the ending, is that it's a film about jazz without any major black characters. This was a flaw with Damien Chazelle's previous film, Whiplash, as well, and it's becoming a bit of a pattern. There's more than a bit of a white saviour narrative to both films. However, Whiplash was a character study about two characters, and so is this one. There are essentially only two major characters in either work, so you cannot change this flaw without either changing the lead actors (which I would not have done in either case) or completely changing the movie (and ruining the pacing to boot). I don't see any way to fix this, but it's a flaw he's going to need to fix in his next film if he's going to continue making films about jazz (as I think he should).
The ending is far more problematic on both artistic and social levels, and I ultimately can't come up with any redeeming qualities to it.
One major problem is that it's simply not satisfying at all. It's often remarked that having the murderer be someone you meet in the last five minutes of a mystery violates a fundamental law of mystery storytelling: it's a cheap cop-out. It doesn't give the viewer a chance to solve the mystery themselves. I consider this film to have violated a parallel law in romances. We spend all this time with the build-up of the romance between Stone and Gosling's characters, and she canonically ends up with a character we know literally nothing about. He has three lines or something. The ending sequence is beautifully shot and has a gorgeous soundtrack, but I would honestly have been much, much happier with the whole film if it had simply not been included and we had been left to imagine for ourselves whether Stone and Gosling's characters got back together and whether their dreams worked out. (It was clear without the epilogue that Stone was going to get the part in the film, anyway.)
Don't get me wrong; I get what they were going for. It just doesn't work for me. The film has a narrative about following one's dreams at all costs, and it's pretty clear that the cost of that was their relationship. And I'm not even sure I disagree with them depicting that in and of itself. If they'd just broken up and then the epilogue hadn't been depicted, I would have probably been satisfied with that. I like the fact that their relationship was realistically depicted with all the strong arguments and failures you get in an actual relationship. Relationships aren't all happily ever after. They require a lot of work, and sometimes, despite all that work, you can't salvage them.
The problem is that we don't see any of that. There's a time skip of five years and canonically we're told that the characters' relationship doesn't work, and we don't even know why. Do they just not get in touch with each other after she gets back from Paris? We don't know. That doesn't seem like something they would do. It's lazy, unsatisfying writing to have them not end up together, but not explain why. Show, don't tell. Fuck, they don't even tell. We get no explanation whatsoever. And who the fuck is this guy she ends up with? If he's in the film at all before then, he's so minor that I didn't even recognise him. The whole film feels like a tremendous bait-and-switch.
And the ending tries to have it both ways with its message, really. It has this message about following one's dreams, but then we see the characters' imagined future together and... it's exactly the same as the one she has with this complete stranger (to the audience). Right down to the smallest little detail. What the fuck is that? That is honestly infuriating and insulting. And it suggests that neither of the characters is actually completely happy with the way things go down, and this is where I get into my bigger problem with the ending.
See, I hate love triangles. I absolutely hate them, and there is a strong sociopolitical reason for this. It boils down to media representation. LGBTQ+ people basically weren't represented in popular media at all until Will and Grace. I'm not sure where transgender people started being represented, but it didn't really take off until the last ten years or so. (There is an uncomfortable joke in the second season, I believe, of Arrested Development at the expense of transgender people. Not even our loved works are perfect.) Gender-non-binary people are still not represented in popular media. And so on.
The way romances are handled in popular media is always, always that a character torn between two potential partners has to make a choice between the two of them. But the truth is that some people are fundamentally not monogamous, and trying to force fundamentally non-monogamous people into monogamy causes serious problems. There are, in real life, plenty of cases in actual love triangles where everyone concerned would actually be happier if the person at the centre of the triangle did not make a choice between the two potential partners. This is almost never even discussed in popular media, and it was once again the case here.
Don't get me wrong; it may not be that much of the population. I can't really be sure how much of the populace is monogamous, how much of the populace is non-monogamous, and how much can go either way. (I am in this third category; we are the bisexuals of monogamy). I'll estimate it at 50%, 25%, and 25%, but I have no source whatsoever for these numbers. I'm not even sure where you could get reliable information about something like this, because, as with transgender people, a number of people may not be willing to be honest with surveyors, or may not even realise their identities yet.
The problem here, of course, is that fundamentally monogamous people should not be in relationships with fundamentally non-monogamous people. Someone is almost always going to end up getting hurt. It may be the fundamentally non-monogamous person for simply doing something that does not make them happy. It may be both of them if the non-monogamous person ends up cheating. It may be the monogamous person when they try non-monogamy and end up hurt by it because they can't handle it. It may be one or both of them in some circumstance I've not imagined. I can't intellectually comprehend either having such a high sex drive/need for romance that it's impossible to be satisfied by one partner or being jealous enough that a partner's involvement with other people would be emotionally bothersome to me, but I accept that both of these are problems for other people. Popular media does not, by contrast, accept one of them.
The problem with media here is that non-monogamous people don't see sympathetic depictions of themselves on screen, so they may not even realise the truth about who they are. (Arrested Development has uncomfortable jokes at the expense of non-monogamy as well.) If they keep trying monogamy and failing, they may end up thinking it's an ethical problem with their self-control, rather than a symptom of them simply trying to fit themselves, as a square peg, into a round hole. Maybe a Hollywood romance isn't the place to address this, but it needs to be addressed somewhere in popular fiction.
The film actually does hint at the possibility of non-monogamy when Stone and Gosling's characters, before the epilogue, say "I'll always love you" or something along those lines. And then the implications of this are completely ignored in the ending, despite the fact that it's clear they still do, in fact, love each other.
But media representation matters. I've discussed aspects of myself that took three decades of my life for me to understand. A large part of this is because I did not have any representation for people like myself in the media, so I did not even know we existed. The lack of representation for non-monogamous people can be an equal problem. This needs to change, and love triangles are particularly representative of the problem, so they stand out for me as a sore spot.
I'm honestly having a difficult time thinking of another film ending I have hated this viscerally. I'm sure there has been one, but I can't remember what it was. I must have blocked it out of my memory. The only ending in any medium I can think of that bothered me this much was the ending of the Farseer trilogy.
Which was a pretty similar ending, come to think of it, in that a really compelling romance was ended by a diabolus ex machina (except in this case, the diabolus ex machina was at least depicted, so it didn't even feel as cheap - it was just a really, really depressing consequence of miscommunication between characters that couldn't have been avoided. It didn't help that I read it at a time when my own relationship was disintegrating for reasons that were also entirely beyond my control and directly related to an inability to communicate, so it hit uncomfortably close to home. At least it got overridden in the sequel trilogy so that Fitz finally got a happy ending; I don't think there's much of a chance of a sequel to this film fixing the ending.)
I guess the fact that I'm having this much of an emotional reaction to the film shows that I was incredibly invested in the characters, but it feels like
a TV show that got cancelled without a resolution, except that there's no excuse here because it's a film and they could have written a resolution if they'd wanted to. There just... isn't any resolution. It's lazy, cheap writing.
Still, despite those flaws, I'm not even sure I can disagree that it's the best film of the year. I'm just going to pretend the last seven minutes don't exist and imagine my own ending.
Or even just pretend that their imagined ending was the real ending and that her romance with her canonical husband was part of some film shoot or something. That actually feels less cheap than the actual ending.
__________________
Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
Hidden Figures was well worth seeing; it's both inspiring and often surprisingly funny. Probably the best part about it is watching how the three lead actresses interact with each other -- it's obvious that the three of them get along like a house afire.
Spoiler alert: Katherine Johnson's calculations were good and thus John Glenn survived his historic flight.
__________________
“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
I stumbled upon Nimród Antal with Kontroll, which was a tight little thriller/drama about ticketing agent in a city metro who deals with various subway dwellers and a serial killer. Loved it, and I'm pretty sure I mentioned it.
Well, the rest of his filmography has been showing up on my DVD queue over time, and Vacancy was - OK. It's a cheesy "horror motel" plot, which I watched for Kate Beckinsale because I am a pig.
Predators was... unfortunate. Not terrible, but not good.
I haven't seen Metallica's Through the Never, and I don't plan to.
That leaves Armored. It's a crime drama - Ty is a decorated veteran who works as an armored car driver. He's in pretty dire straits as he lost his parents, he's losing his house to a punishing mortgage and his brother to truancy and petty crime. So, his godfather and friends convince him to go along with faking a robbery - until they kill a witness. Then Ty locks himself in the truck with half the money.
I genuinely enjoyed this. Of course, it has Matt Dillon, Lawrence Fishburne, and Jean Reno as the core of the group of criminals. Fishburne in particular is having fun playing the trigger happy, hyper aggressive, tough guy wannabe.
One problem with this movie - it's all men. It's a multi-ethnic group, sure, but none of the security guards are women? Not even the background cast is noticeably female. That takes the movie down a few pegs.
Directed by Karyn Kusama who also directed the awful Jennifer's Body. This, however, is not awful! The story unfolds during a dinner party in Hollywood Hills in the house of the protagonist Wills' ex-wife Eden. After the accidental death of their young son she spent the last 2 years in Mexico and re-married.
It's a really, really good thriller with a great atmosphere! The very end is a bit ... unnecessary but on the whole: very good! 8/10
The first thing I saw Kate Beckinsale in was Much Ado About Nothing. She played Hero, but didn't make much of an impression -- but then, it isn't a role that gives an actor much to work with.
The next thing I saw her in was Emma, in which she was just fantastic. I've certainly never seen a better version of Emma, and unlike some other actresses I could mention, Beckinsale managed the perfect balance of making Emma Woodhouse come across as spoiled and sometimes insensitive, but nonetheless a very kind, decent, and well-intentioned person at heart. In the scene where Mr. Knightly tells her how spoiled and insensitive she sometimes is, you can just see Emma's heart break -- that's how good an actress Ms Beckinsale is.
Sadly, her talents have been wasted in most of her subsequent work, in my opinion. Granted, she looks awfully good in skin-tight leather.
__________________
“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
Re: Seen Any Good Movies...?
easter eggs one of my favorites was how Chirrut Imwe was described as a former Guardian of the Whills. A very nerdy, somewhat obscure reference.
..
Linear Mode
