“Spenser, with a S, like the poet.”
My teenage son has been on a Christopher Nolan binge lately and since he was too young to catch these when they came out we’ve been going back to them.
Watched The Prestige over the weekend and it’s still great even if the obsession/dedication to magic by both main characters had them coming off as assholes.
Will be watching Dunkirk later this week then all he has left is Memento. His favorite so far has been TENET. He’s seen it a few times and is one of the few people I know that can wrap his head around what is going on in all the scenes.
This is irrelevant to how good the movie is, but you should note that it is not true that the average intelligence is decreasing around the world, as Idiocracy was claiming. Indeed, throughout the twentieth century the average intelligence was increasing in relatively well-off countries This is called the Flynn effect. It’s only possible to talk about what was happening in relatively well-off countries, because in poor countries people were seldom taking I.Q. tests. If it’s a choice between learning what your I.Q. us and having enough to eat, you’re going to settle for having enough to eat. The people is well-off countries probably had increasing levels of intelligence because of improved nutrition, less disease, and better education and a generally more stimulating environment. It’s not so clear what has happened in he twenty-first century. Intelligence has probably plateaued in well-off countries because the factors making intelligence increase in the twentieth century haven’t got much better.
Also, it didn’t come out in my own oversimplified “elevator pitch” type review, but the critical factor in the movie was not so much a lowering of intelligence in the sense of people’s overall capacity to learn and make use of the knowledge. Rather, it was more a decline in people’s tolerance for education and critical thinking. That’s a distinction worth making. We might speculate that in a different environment, Frito could have actually been a pretty bright guy and functioned as such.
And it’s something I’ve observed in my life in the so-called real world. I figured out at a pretty young age (in my sixties now) that people in general reacted to me better if I reserved my use of five-dollar words for times when I was with my little inner circle of like-minded people. I don’t want to say I “dumbed it down” because I get that there’s a level where you can end up sounding pompous regardless of your audience.
I never could get past the eugenics aspect of it.
One of our theaters now sells blankets/throws at the concession stand. This is Minnesota, so partly because of A/C being too cold, but perhaps for use in the winter too. I bring my own regardless of the season.
I’m catching up by watching all the of MI movies back-to-back (on Paramount). I’ve heard that the first hour of the new movie has lots of callbacks, so I’m refreshing my memory in anticipation. But one reason to watch at home is they get have been getting longer and longer. The first one was less than two hours, and the last one is a whole hour longer. Intermission please!
I didn’t see a eugenics aspect, although I’m willing to be convinced. If the movie is to be seen as a sort of “general argument” in favor of eugenics, Judge didn’t do himself any favors by portraying the smart but childless couple at the beginning as thoroughly unlikable. Who’d want a world full of them?
It was very reminiscent of the X-Files final episode, which also had a lot of flashbacks as the creators had to explain to themselves (it seemed to me) WTF had occurred which led us to this point.
28 Days Later
Recommended.
Good zombie(sort of) movie and really was a start of a resurgence in zombie movies, etc. It’s well done, but the choice to shoot it on commercially available digital cameras(in 2002) was a bad idea. It looks bad and this was an HD copy of the movie. The cameras weren’t good enough, though it does sort of fit the style of the movie.
I liked it, but didn’t love it. I think Walking Dead did a lot of the zombie stuff this movie did, but did it better just a few years later.
Not to mention Train to Busan, which did the whole thing another step better than even Walking Dead.
28 Weeks Later
Recommended.
I might say this is better than the first one, to be honest. Intense, scary, well done. A good zombie attacks movie with a lot of tension. My favorite thing about this movie series is that people turn in about 20 seconds time, so if you are infected, it’s over before you do anything other than say, “Kill me!” or something dramatic.
There eise another sequel(28 Years Later) this year and get this, another one next year. I’m looking forward to see what they have for us, but there is better zombie content out there.
I recommend:
Return of the Living Dead
Train to Busan
Warm Bodies
All better.
Well, I guess I don’t dislike all the movies you like! 
I love Warm Bodies. It’s my second favorite zombie movie after Shaun of the Dead.
The M:I callbacks in the latest film felt very much like they were for the audience members who hadn’t seen any if them but had been dragged along by their other half who was desperate to watch it and didn’t want to go on their own. I found them pointless (to me) but harmless.
I think what makes a good zombie movie is the set pieces, and that’s where Train to Busan really pays off, where almost all of the events happen in the very claustrophobic confines of car-to-car fighting, with the end of each train car being a barrier. On top of that, Train to Busan is very good at sketching out characters very quickly, and so you have feelings about all of them (positive or negative). One of my favorite horror movies. Never saw the sequel though. (or prequel, can’t remember)
Boyle’s direction and pacing in 28 Days is weird, there are fewer of those set pieces, and he seems to want to wallow in the threatening emptiness of England city and countryside, plus the plot development of why certain people are desired is honestly kind of gross & unnecessary additional horror in what is, for chrissake, a zombie movie.
Maybe I’d appreciate the slow bits if the scenery were more familiar? Honestly my only positive from that one is that I laughed at loud (with appreciation) at how one character is unexpectedly turned.
I think it was a bit of a trailblazer in the popularisation of the modern rabid (rather than dead) speed zombies, Walking Dead is much more slow, hidey and can’t turn a handle, looks pretty easy to survive if you have a door or two, zombie genre from the Romero times.
They do share the bleak empty atomosphere though.
Regarding The Walking Dead, I stopped watching after the first episode and am annoyed that it and its many spin-offs dominate AMC’s schedule since. Sunday nights at 9pm used to have great shows (Mad Men, Breaking Bad, etc) but now it’s just The Walking Dead, all the damned time.
Yep, the problem is that the Walking Dead was of relatively low quality by the time it ended, with lazy writers, lots of episodes full of nothing, and constantly repeating tropes, but this was very successful so they think this is a formula they can continue to repeat for a long time.
Walking dead got worse start of season 2, improved a little, then got very bad after season 5, then awful after season 9, and even fans which “enjoyed” it near the end complain about the quality of the spinoffs.
I’m long done with it, I only sort of stayed with it till Season 9 because I read the comics, but once those were done, it was like if George R R Martin had finished Game and Thrones well, but Benioff and Weiss hadn’t read it and still did that bad later seasons. Then three seasons more. Then span off.
But yes, it has killed AMC.
Not to beat a dead horse, but Wikipedia lists six spin-off series of The Walking Dead (Fear the Walking Dead, World Beyond, Tales of the Walking Dead, Dead City, Daryl Dixon, and The Ones Who Live).
A…zombie horse?
I held in there for way longer than I should have. I should have stopped watching the main show when Glenn died, but inertia and sunk cost fallacy kept me tuning in for several more seasons. Fear the Walking Dead was pretty good; no regrets there. But I definitely should not have watched World Beyond.
I found it immensely satisfying to have already given up before the last two or three spinoffs premiered. The opposite of sunk cost; it was like found winnings to not have to waste all those hours on a universe I’d long since stopped caring about.
Enormous grains. Although it’s complicated by the fact that the main character has a history of severe trauma, which could explain some of his behavior just as well.
I just remembered watching the end of the film where they’re trying to end on an inspirational note. Yes, if we just accepted autists’ differences, perhaps they too could be the best violently sociopathic criminal accountants the world has ever seen.
That was generally my issue with it. It was both an anti-hero action film and a hamfisted attempt to make autism understandable and more accepted, but the context kind of reinforced the stigma even more.
But like, if you don’t think about it that deeply, it’s fine.
Regarding the portrayal of autism in The Accountant, it’s almost shown as a superpower. I think that’s even more true of the sequel, where we see autistic children with astonishing hacking skills.
Many parents of autistic kids/autistic people tire of the assumption that it comes with a super power. So when we were asked that of our son, I said, “Actually, autistic people are no more likely to be gifted as compared to the general population, it’s something of a stereotype… But anyhow, it’s math. His superpower is math.”
That kid is all about numbers. I checked on him once before bed and he was just curled up against the pillows, playing with his calculator, looking totally blissed.
I appreciated that the film had one of those cool, “writing equations all over the walls” scenes. Every good movie about smart people needs one of those. Especially when some asshole doubts how smart they are.
(At the population level, autistic people are a little bit better at math. I saw a brain study done where they found the part of the brain normally employed for facial recognition is used for math in autistic people.)