Nyad. It was fine. You’ve seen 10 films like this before. I think Jodie was better than Benning, but then I’ve always been pro-Jodie.
Glengarry GlenRoss Attention. Interest. Desire. Action. Coffee is for closers. You know the lines, it is worth a rewatch every now and then.
I just watched Ricky Stanicky on Amazon Prime, a Peter Farrelly movie with John Cena and Zac Efron. It’s pretty good! About kids who invent a made-up friend to blame for their troublemaking shenanigans, and twenty years later are forced into a situation where they need to hire an out-of-work actor to portray him.
It was filmed here in Melbourne, and in fact there’s a lengthy sequence at a bris that was filmed two doors down from my house. Despite that I never got to meet any of stars.
American Fiction
Not recommended.
A not very funny comedy, so mostly just kind of boring. It was just OK and I did laugh once or twice, but this mostly fell flat. I get it. Nerdy intellectual Black guy pretends to be tough guy from the hood. I’ve seen it done much better than this. This movie had nothing particularly new or interesting to offer.
Just kind of OK. Skip it.
If you would like to see nerdy Black guys pretend to be tough guys, this is the funniest version of this trope I’ve seen.
Wow. So completely not the point of that film.
This is a very strange take.
Smiley’s People (1982). It’s been really funny to watch Alec Guinness playing a podgy, retired spy, carefully wiping his glasses, at around the same time he was playing a Jedi master. That aside, I terrifically enjoyed re-seeing this, but I suspect for someone not familiar with the book, it would’ve been quite a slog.
Stopmotion
Highly recommended.
Ooh, boy, I liked this movie quite a bit, but I do think I’ll need to see it one more time to fully process it. I can’t get into it without spoilers, but I’m not sure I fully understood ever plot point. It was very strange, but terrific. I haven’t seen a movie like this since Censor in 2021 and that ended up on my top 10 list of the year that year.
Definitely worth your time and a rental. Go in blind. I didn’t know what it was and I liked it a lot.
Yeah, de gustibus non est disputandum and all, but as I remarked last month, I thought American Fiction definitely ticked a lot of the “new and interesting” boxes.
And watching that linked sitcom sketch that Mahaloth thinks is a better and funnier version of the “trope” of “a nerdy Black guy pretending to be a 'hood tough” than American Fiction makes that take seem even more… peculiar. Well, like I said, de gustibus.
Yeah American Fiction was my #2 film of 2023. The idea that the plot is “nerdy Black guy pretends to be tough guy from the hood” is bizarre to say the least.
I mean, yeah there are a couple scenes in which the American Fiction protagonist is forced by circumstances to directly impersonate the imaginary fugitive convict to whom the authorship of his book is ascribed. But that’s like, what, five minutes of the whole movie?
I guess you could say that those scenes are the most conventionally and straightforwardly “comical” in the film. So if Mahaloth thought that the movie as a whole was intending to deliver that kind of full-on farcical absurdity, then I can see why he might have been disappointed, because it definitely didn’t.
But, again, I agree with you and commasense and Maserschmidt that it wasn’t trying to.
Hadn’t seen it in 30-some years, but last weekend I watched George Romero’s Martin. It’s the story of a disturbed young man who believes he’s an 80 year old vampire; lacking fangs, he resorts to razor blades to get his crimson fix. Hampered by a low budget and sorta long, but stylish and – for the most part – well acted (lots of Romero regulars in the cast). Some social commentary and a kinda-shocking ending contribute to the fun. Nosferatu!
I saw Martin not that long ago and I thought it was quite good.
Saltburn
Recommended
I actually was not fully on board with this movie the first hour or so. I thought it was OK, but a bit too slow and meandering. Then…yes, I would say this movie revealed itself quite well in the second half and continued to improve all the way to the end, which I found riveting.
Barry Keoghan delivers another stunning performance and makes the movie.
Finally managed to track down the actor who I always get confused with over Barry Keoghan, the ugly one, vs the pretty one, who is Tye Sheridan (was in X men movies).
Ghostbusters (2016). It was also marketed as Ghostbusters: Answer the Call. Seeing as a new film is coming out this year, I wanted to catch up on the most recent entries. Although I knew this one was not going to be in the continuity of the others I saw it was available and decided to check it out. I had heard vaguely the controversy surrounding the film, but had never even seen a preview so I did not know what to expect.
It is a decent comedy. A movie like this really does hang on the chemistry of the ensemble cast and for the most part it worked well. There were some laugh out loud moments and it was great and unexpected to see Andy Garcia in the film as well as Michael K Williams even if he had a small part. I liked the inclusion of the original cast as well as how they worked in references to the first movie. On the whole it was a pleasant light film, certainly not deserving of the vitriol it apparently garnered.
//i\\
I agree with you about Saltburn – a very good movie, if not up to the high standard of Promising Young Woman that Emerald Fennel had achieved earlier. It does take a while to figure out what it’s really about, but then it kicks in in a fairly powerful way.
On the subject of American Fiction, I have to concur with others that your summary didn’t really convey what the film was about. But at the same time, while I don’t agree with your entirely negative assessment, I think the film was overrated. It was nominated in a lot of Oscar categories, but won only one – for best adapted screenplay – and I would question whether even that was deserved; I would have rather given it to Poor Thngs, Zone of Interest, or Oppenheimer.
I wouldn’t really describe its turning point as a twist, but the confirmation and reveal of what is really going on with our lead character really worked quite well and by the end, I will admit the movie had gone a quite different direction than I expected. I went in with about zero knowledge and found myself going from “Ugh, whatever” to “Wait…wait…oh wow” quite a bit, which is impressive.
I commented up thread that it’s my favorite of the reboots/sequels/whatevers. The story is just as good as any other movie. The special effects are just as impressive and everybody in the film is hilarious.
Just finished Road House with Jake Gyllenhaal.
If you enjoyed the original, you’ll enjoy this. They knew what kind of movie they were (re)making, and the script leans into it (the plot’s appropriately ludicrous), but they play it straight on screen. There’s plenty of casual violence. It works.
On another note, Conor McGregor is really not a good actor. I don’t think he has a The Rock-like A-list movie star career in front of him.
American Fiction is my favorite movie of the Oscar noms that I’ve seen. It utterly skewers the current stupid age. “Nerdy black guys pretending to be tough” is just such a bizzare take. Who was pretending to be tough?