My daughter and I were able to see this in “Imax” and that was a very special thing. She had never seen a Miyazaki movie in the theater and this was a great experience. The movie is amazing, but honestly very strange. I felt like if David Lynch and Miyazaki got together to make a movie, this could have been it. What a bizarre movie.
But amazing and satisfying and masterfully made. I recommend it to everyone and it will be in my top 10 movies of the year.
(The Imax was not a full Imax, just a larger screen that Imax sells its label on)
It wasn’t funny and both my wife and I were disappointed. Bill Murray is shouting his way through this movie and I see online that he indeed was disappointed how loud Richard Donner wanted him to be. There were a couple laughs, but mostly it was just met with silence from my wife and me.
National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989). I’m sure I’ve mentioned this many times elsewhere, but this is a real Christmas classic, an absolute joy of a Christmas movie. It’s a perfect intro to the holiday season that you can watch again and again, year after year! The theme song “Christmas Vacation” performed by Mavis Staples never gets old, either.
Just finished watching Leave the World Behind and came here specifically to see if anyone else had seen it. /
I thought it did a great job of keeping the viewer guessing and engaged. A bit social commentary / doomsday situation. I was taken aback by Julia Roberts’ character, mostly because we don’t see her play an uptight, unkind person very often. She played it so well it got me wondering if that’s closer to her real personality than the America’s sweetheart that we usually see ( not that I’m implying she’s a monster or anything, just showed a bit more depth than her usual smiling, charming side).
I don’t usually go for apocalyptic, special effect driven films but some of these were very effective tanker running up on the beach, millions of propaganda pamphlets falling from a drone.
There are some plot holes and nits to pick but I would still recommend it.
We liked it though at one point I really sympathized with anyone having to listen to Julia’s character rant 24/7. A bit unsatisfactory ending is my only complaint, I think it honestly would have made a good limited series.
We watched this over the weekend and I wanted to comment on it as well.
Yeah, good God, “the animals are trying to tell us something” is the stupidest, most worn out damn trope. That plot point was the worst part of the movie.
Yeah, I was amused by that too. I’m sure Elon Musk was not amused though. I’m surprised they actually used Teslas in the movie, and not some made-up brand of self-driving vehicle.
Which made me wonder-- how much damage could actually be done in a cyberattack. Disable power to large regions of the country? Probably. Could the Teslas be controlled by remote hackers? Maybe.
But the oil tanker would not run aground like that. They have, like, actual people watching where they’re going in addition to GPS, and manual controls. And planes might have trouble landing in that kind of cyberattack chaos, but I’m pretty sure their controls could not be remotely taken over to the extent that they’d just be falling out of the sky, right?
One thing I noticed right in the opening credits was “Executive produced by Barack and Michelle Obama” so right from the start I was watching for social / political commentary. The central point is summed up by Kevin Bacon’s doomsday prepper character:
“The easiest way for a foreign power to take over a country is a 3-step method: one, cut off communication; two, introduce chaos and misinformation. Then step three takes care of itself. Without a clear enemy to focus on, a country that is dysfunctional enough will turn on itself and do the work for the enemy.”
So, the big lesson I took was “if we don’t solve our deep political and social divisions, we won’t survive as a country for much longer”.
We watched Love and Monsters with Jessica Henwick and the dude from the Maze Runner movies. It was a fun post-apocalyptic movie in the style of The Mist meets Zombieland.
The more I think about this movie the less I like it. It was well acted, and well produced, it did effectively create tension and uncertainty around what was happening. However, like the TV show Lost, the underlying scenario is a confused mess. The ride was great, the destination, eh.
With respect to the characters we follow, there’s the occasional dumb movie choice, the occasional “who would actually say that?”, but they’re believable people who make largely believable choices.
WRT the scenario we have an enemy that can take down our energy grid, cell phone grid, internet, satellites, GPS, broadcast TV and Radio, can take over the self drive system of individual Teslas, can broadcast ear splitting noises to people dozens of miles away from population centers, fly large propaganda dropping drones, make airplanes crash into the beach, put flamingos in Long Island, and cause deer to congregate in huge threatening herds. It’s just a bit out there.
Yeah, it’s not aging well with me either. I didn’t think it was even particularly well-acted. Mrs. Solost said at one point “is it just me, or is Julia Robert’s acting progressively getting worse?”
And the script had plenty of issues. The black / white conflict between the main characters felt awkward and shoehorned in. As mentioned, I thought that “the animals are trying to tell us something” subplot was ridiculous. The constant deep-bass “WHOMMMMMMMMMMM” soundtrack effect borrowed from Christopher Nolan’s bag of tricks quickly got annoying. That shed the kids discovered. that somebody had apparently been sleeping in, and possibly spying on the house from, was a weird loose plot thread.
I also thought the “Havana Syndrome on steroids” subplot was pretty silly, and I was a little surprised that it was included in a movie sanctioned by the Obamas. Despite the real-life supposed instances of it having been investigated by government agencies, there’s never been any proof that it actually exists, at least as some sort of ultrasonic weapon wielded by enemy powers; It’s barely above the level of urban legend.
I get that a lot of people didn’t like the ending of Leave The World Behind but I found it to be kind of a take away message.The world was falling apart and all the little girl was concerned about was how Friends ended. She said it was because she cared for these fictional people more than she did those in real life. Her brother even said “yeah, maybe you shouldn’t”. So as a viewer you’re watching the characters in a story and now you’re doing the same thing. Caring more about what’s going to happen to them than the real world scenario around you. And the movie is trying to tell you "Wake up and stop caring about fictional people in a movie! Go do something about the shit going on outside!
The updated one from the early 2000’s was good as well, as it shifted the blame to middle-eastern people and the town blamed them for potential terrorism when the power goes out.
My wife and I also recently watched May December on Netflix staring Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman, loosely inspired by the Mary Kay Letourneau story. It was well acted and the director did a great job creating a morally ambiguous and unsettling atmosphere. But I also found it very boring.
I just saw the Boy and the Heron too, and had a similar reaction. It seemed more like a dream than a movie with a plot; I wished I got slightly more backstory in the time-free-dimension world. It hit on all the Miyazaki greatest hits, but I don’t think it will be one I rewatch very often. It, of course, looked fantastic. I did like that he is still experimenting with animation, such as the fire scene at the very beginning with the smudge-y lines. I wish he would do more shorts where he can just get weird and experimental.
It seemed like it was a big farewell letter to his son Goro about the ultimate silliness of a legacy - as in, just because I spent my life making these things I think are Very Good, it doesn’t mean you have to, I free you child, etc.
I also appreciated the sheer number of murderous parakeets.