We just watched. I liked it, but definitely not top tier. The emotional journey of Shuri was good, but felt too rushed. I’d prefer slower pacing. It’s nice to see a sympathetic protagonist make mistake after mistake. The fighting just seemed peripheral to the story. I know, people want action out of their comic-book movies, but it’s not always necessary for me.
The development of the antagonist was good enough for a bad guy. We’ll get more in a later movie. I’m happy how they’re finally moving on in the overall story arc.
The surprise in the intra-credits scene was a nice surprise.
I watched Skinamarink yesterday; I think you pretty much nailed it; experimental project. I’d been hearing some buzz about it - I believe it’s still in theaters. It’s weird and menacing and frankly, due to the young age of the “stars”, feels a bit exploitive. @Eyebrows_0f_Doom is not lying when he says it does not lead to anything. If you really feel you want to check it out, you could just watch the first and last 10 minutes; no need to sit through the entire thing,
The Extra Man This was a pretty odd film starring Kevin Kline and Paul Dano. Dano is a writer moving to NYC and takes a room with Kline, who is a bizarre elderly male escort, who specializes is being the “extra man” at fancy parties so that there is an even number of men and women in attendance.
Vengeance is written, directed and starring B.J. Novak. The story of a NYC writer/podcaster (seems like a theme) who is contacted by the family of a girl he once casually dated some time in the past. The family believes they are actively, exclusively dating, and when she dies he is talked into going to Texas for her funeral, and subsequent investigation of her murder. Good solid movie, nice twists and turns, interesting characters, this was a fun watch.
I watched Black Panther: Wakanda Forever last night and have been pondering why I’m just not very excited about the MCU anymore. There are jus so many characters shoved into a film like this, that it’s impossible to care about any of them. Even a loner like Namor has a whole army and at least three distinct speaking characters in tow. I’m not having any trouble keeping track of all the characters, but the effort to care about all (or any) of them just isn’t in me. It worked when it was just an Avengers movie every three years or so, but now every movie is made like a comic book version of The Longest Day.
Today, I think I’ll just crawl into my box of old Marvel Team-Up comics from the 1970s.
Brad’s Status (2017) Ben Stiller takes his son to Harvard while he angsts about his life vs the success of his own college peers.
Meh. Wasn’t bad. Directed by Mike White of White Lotus fame.
But the reason I bring it up: I’d never heard of this title before we were on a cruise ship and it was on the menu of dozens of on-demand films, most of which I’d never heard of. Like this one. Or: did you know that Nicole Kidman made a movie where she plays Princess Grace? “Grace of Monaco” (2014). A lot of these titles have film festival awards plastered over them…where did they go? Are studios cranking out films that go straight to on-demand?
This was super annoying. I told my son there was a wonderfully creepy, disturbing movie he would like called Goodnight Mommy. So we watched it, and the whole time something felt “off” to me, like this was not nearly as weird as I remembered. When we got to the ending and a major plot point was not at all what I remembered, I was like “something is majorly wrong here”. Only then did I realize we were watching a 2022 REMAKE that was far more sanitized for American mainstream audiences, and the original Australian version was the one I had seen years ago, which was FAR superior.
So I spoiled the entire movie, with a far duller experience. Ugh. Why do they do remakes that suck?
I wasn’t aware they’d done a remake(small nitpick; the original is Austrian). Heck, I can’t believe the original is from 2014. Anyway, it should be easy to find.
One of the things I liked about it is that I expected him, as a NY guy, to go to Texas and encounter a bunch of idiots(or at least he’ll think they are dumb). Uh, he gets there and…what do you know? Lots of them Texans are damn smart.
I didn’t love it, but he did twist what I expected from the movie.
Ugh, the German one is amazing. I am by no means surprised they ruined it. For sure, one of the most memorable moments I’ve seen the past decade or so is:
Mommy on fire and her ghost(?) walking out of the house at the end. :shivers:
In an attempt to behave as if my life were happening contemporaneously, I’ve been watching a few movies made within the past year for a change, but I haven’t liked most of them:
EVERYWHERE EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE was awful. I didn’t go for the multiple languages schtick, or the mundane problems of the protagonist, but when it started being fantastical, I tuned it out.
THE BANSHEES OF WHEREVER was almost as mundane. If not for the Irish setting which was lovely to look at, this was a plotless movie. Someone I don’t care about doesn’t want to talk to someone else I don’t care about after several decades of friendship. If this were set in modern-day USA, would I watch even five minutes of it? I would not.
AMSTERDAM was the most intriguing of the three. The IMDB ratings were crazy–almost all of them were either 10s or 1s. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I understand why the reception was so love it or hate it. The plot never really got established, and when it started to, about an hour in with the appearance of De Niro, it got mildly entertaining. Most of the attraction was in the star actors, mostly doing passable turns, if far from their best performances.
I’m going to return to films of the 1930-1970s for a while again.
Yeah! And you can tell where they come from by their accent. From France? A French accent. From Mexico? A Mexican Accent. From … somewhere else? A British accent. Everyone from everywhere else sounds vaguely British (at least in the movies).
It just seemed like an affectation in that film. Too much work to keep reading the subtitles when they switched to Chinese, and to listen to their English when they switched back.
I just saw EEAAO this weekend too, and while I agree that the subtitles make a fair bit of work for the viewer, I think it’s a bit bizarre to call their use an “affectation” or a “schtick”.
The main characters were first-generation Chinese immigrants communicating both with their Chinese-speaking relatives and friends and with their English-speaking acquaintances and daughter. What else would they do but speak both Chinese and English, which occasionally blurs into a bilingual mix in their own conversation? Haven’t you ever heard real-life non-native English speakers in an English-speaking country engaging in exactly that kind of mixed-language discourse?
Of all the stuff in EEAAO that could be considered artificial and unrealistic and “affected”, you seem to have fastened onto about the LEAST artificial and unrealistic and affected thing about it!
Sure. I grew up in such a bilingual household. I just didn’t enjoy seeing a movie that emphasized the two languages in such an awkward way. They have every right to make a film that uses the subtitles and incessant language-switching the way they did, and I have every right not to enjoy it.
Note that some of the people speaking Chinese were speaking Mandarin and some were speaking Cantonese (which are different languages, not dialects of a single language).
I just finished a really intense documentary on Netflix: Gladbeck: The Hostage Crisis (2022). It’s a tragic farce about the police and media doing everything wrong. Except for some short postscripts, the entire movie is assembled from 1988 media and security footage with no post-event opinion or retrospective comment. As an American, I hadn’t even heard of this hostage crisis, although I suspect it’s well known in Germany and is probably used by law enforcement and journalism classes worldwide as a text book example of what NOT to do in a hostage situation.