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Post by DangOlJimmyITellYouWhat on Nov 28, 2020 23:01:45 GMT -5
I’m watching this right now, and Harper’s family is too horrible for me to find amusing. I see what they were going for, but it needs to be a little more over the top for it to be funny. As is, the family is just a little too realistic to do anything other than piss me off. Well, I didn't say it was good, I said I enjoyed it.
I thought the sisters were ridiculously over the top, and I definitely got the most laughs out of the dippy artist one, but I was also pretty high when I watched this.
I wanted Alison Brie to be just a little more over the top throughout; more Alison from Orphan Black  (which she did hit when talking about the baskets). But you’re right, I was expecting more comedy and less drama. |
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Post by DangOlJimmyITellYouWhat on Nov 28, 2020 23:54:57 GMT -5
Also warning, Uncle Frank on Amazon is in no way a quirky Southern comedy, no matter what the trailer would have you think. It isn’t “girl & her uncle take a road trip to his dad’s funeral,” per the summary, it’s more “girl’s favorite uncle deals with self-loathing and guilt” and could be decently triggering.
I mean it’s Alan Ball, so perhaps I should have expected it.
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Post by nowimnothing on Nov 29, 2020 12:23:59 GMT -5
Tenet (2020)Everything is in service to the special effects which are spectacular if a bit weightless. The overall plot is pretty straightforward* but the specifics of why things are happening is incomprehensible. It compares very poorly with Primer where the time loops were equally opaque but better tied into the plot. *
You could even say cliché. Basically James Bond tries to stop an evil rich guy from destroying the world. He does so by befriending the rich guy's estranged wife.
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Post by Nudeviking on Nov 29, 2020 19:38:41 GMT -5
Christmas Eve on Sesame Street (1978) - I’ve seen recent episodes of Sesame Street and am kind of bummed out by how clean it all is. This Sesame Street Christmas special from 1978 is, by comparison, gritty as fuck. Sesame Street is a dump and the characters are all dressed like extras out of Deathwish. If that wasn’t enough the story told here is one of existential dread where Santa Claus is reduced to a creeping shadow and Big Bird nearly freezes to death trying to figure out how he gets down the chimney. Shit is tight as fuck!
I watched this with my daughter who was probably about the same age I was when I first saw this. She howled with laughter at the antics of Cookie Monster and also when Grover did man on the street interviews with some 70s kids talking about “Santa keys.” Overall a perfectly cromulent way to spend an hour on a Sunday afternoon.
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Post by Floyd Diabolical Barber on Nov 29, 2020 23:42:01 GMT -5
Bill and Ted Face the Music 2020 I was surprised at how much feelings I got for a silly movie about two silly, but earnest and good-hearted dudes, their families, their friends, some historical musicians, and Death. Every now and then, simply for my own mental health, I want a good movie where there, in the end, no one really turns out to be evil. Not even Death. This was one of those movies.
A decades later sequel like this could very easily have been an immediately forgettable sellout, or just an embarrassing cash grab, but this isn't. The whole thing is loopy and kinda disjointed, but it has a lot heart, and it all comes together for a satisfying conclusion. There were a lot of little touches that made it worthwhile. They wove the spirit and memory of the late George Carlin's "Rufus" into the fabric of the movie in a way that I really appreciated. Bill and Ted's wives, and now their daughters, as well as Rufus's wife and daughter, had important plot lines, and they all felt organic and not shoehorned in, and that really added to the movie. The stakes, of course were no less than existence itself, and as goofy as it all was, it really made me feel good when it was over. I needed that. Bill and Ted's attitude and words of wisdom are more relevant in this shitty year than ever before, even while social distancing.
Be Excellent to each other! Party On Dudes!
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Post by Superb Owl 🦉 on Nov 30, 2020 14:34:49 GMT -5
Last Christmas
This is how I decided to fill the "light holiday entertainment, but better than Hallmark production/writing levels" niche I found myself and Owlette with one night. This is one of those movies you'll watch with your spouse and start joking "hey, wouldn't it be really funny if ______ was a big twist at the end?" and then that actually ends up being the big twist.
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Post by chalkdevil 😈 on Nov 30, 2020 17:44:36 GMT -5
Romeo + Juliet (1996)
Look, it's pretty obvious that I am a product of my uncouth generation and that can't truly experience the high brow works of The Bard without guns and fast, MTV-style editing. I'm also going to need my Shakespeare to have a banging pop music soundtrack, shirtless Leonardo DiCaprio screaming his lines in the rain, and Claire Danes looking down and away because she's so shy and pure. I'm going to need everything dialed way the fuck up to 11. I'm going to need the dad from Tommy Boy and the Ross and Monica's mom to have a couple lines each. I need it to have so much Catholic imagery it would make Martin Luther make the sign of the cross. I need Paul Rudd to show up a couple times so I can say, "Hey, it's Paul Rudd, that guy doesn't age." Then we'll all laugh because he is much more handsome then we'll ever be. I need it to end on a sad song from Radiohead, the way all things must end.
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Post by Nudeviking on Nov 30, 2020 19:50:54 GMT -5
Christmas Eve on Sesame Street (1978)
This Sesame Street Christmas special from 1978 is, by comparison, gritty as fuck. Sesame Street is a dump and the characters are all dressed like extras out of Deathwish. When I was a little kid it was at the tail end of grimy-and-dangerous cities so that kind of texture was natural and didn’t really stand out (I never noticed the clothes bc they were—and still are pretty much—just standard winter clothes on the T/L/subway, at least as of a few years ago). When my little sister started watching Sesame Street they started to clean up and I thought the show seemed way more cartoony, but that was also about the same time Starbucks started moving in. I think I'm probably of an age with you so how grimy and dangerous Sesame Street looked never really registered because it was in set in NYC and that's what NYC looked like at the time but now that I've got a child and have seen the shiny happy cartoony Sesame Street, going back and seeing the older stuff (like this movie) is kind of wild for how relatively "real" it feels. Sure it's a show for kindergartners, but the New York City present here doesn't feel all that different from the one in The Warriors and that's kind of wild to me. As for the close it's was more than everyone was dressed in clothes that people in New York in the winter in 1978 would have been wearing (Lots of brown. Lots of cabbie hats. An occasional Rangers hockey jersey.) while in modern sesame street that isn't really the case. Everyone's in bright colors, there are no references to things that really exist in the real world (ie the New York Rangers), and you'd be hard pressed to find even a single cabbie hat. |
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Post by Desert Dweller on Dec 1, 2020 0:51:37 GMT -5
Last Christmas
This is how I decided to fill the "light holiday entertainment, but better than Hallmark production/writing levels" niche I found myself and Owlette with one night. This is one of those movies you'll watch with your spouse and start joking "hey, wouldn't it be really funny if ______ was a big twist at the end?" and then that actually ends up being the big twist. Isn't that the movie where everyone guessed the twist from the trailer that was released 6 weeks before the movie came out? |
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Post by Superb Owl 🦉 on Dec 1, 2020 7:23:07 GMT -5
Last Christmas
This is how I decided to fill the "light holiday entertainment, but better than Hallmark production/writing levels" niche I found myself and Owlette with one night. This is one of those movies you'll watch with your spouse and start joking "hey, wouldn't it be really funny if ______ was a big twist at the end?" and then that actually ends up being the big twist. Isn't that the movie where everyone guessed the twist from the trailer that was released 6 weeks before the movie came out? Maybe? I vaguely remembered it coming out when I was scrolling HBO Max, but must not have paid much attention at the time. |
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Post by Albert Fish Taco on Dec 3, 2020 13:30:57 GMT -5
Prole Hole , please consider a watch of D'Antoni's The Seven-Ups (1973) if you're ever feeling the need to watch something similar to The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. Fun Fact - The apartment building I grew up in can be seen across the street in the background in one scene in that flick. Also Roy Scheider's character even disparages the larger brutalist monstrosity (if you're from the Bronx or even lower Westchester you surely know which co-op complex I'm referring to just on the description) at the other end of my block that had just been completed a year or two before this was filmed. |
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Post by Powerthirteen on Dec 4, 2020 13:03:48 GMT -5
A Leo Mccarey 1937 double feature of Make Way For Tomorrow (weepy) and The Awful Truth (hysterical.) We expected the latter to offer the usual gentle amusement of old comedies and instead found ourselves guffawing heartily, because it's great. Possibly the funniest screwball I've ever seen.
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Post by Powerthirteen on Dec 4, 2020 14:50:24 GMT -5
Powerthirteen Coincidentally The Awful Truth is already at the top of my watchlist. Screwball is great—my grandmother loved them and passed that on to my dad when they’d air on TV, and he passed that appreciation on to me. Oh, you're in for a treat. |
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Post by Superb Owl 🦉 on Dec 5, 2020 9:56:33 GMT -5
The Thin Man
It was good! Going to make “Thin Man is a Christmas movie!” the Die Hard meme for the TCM crowd.
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Post by Superb Owl 🦉 on Dec 5, 2020 12:06:13 GMT -5
It Happened on 5th Avenue
Making my way through HBO Max’s TCM holiday offerings. Pretty entertaining. Just a shame that whole subplot about a billionaire real estate investor trying to sink a desperately needed low-income housing project so he can slap up a goods distribution complex wouldn’t resonate today...
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Post by The Stuffingtacular She-Hulk on Dec 7, 2020 15:19:58 GMT -5
Yesterday, I watched Rashomon for the first time, because it was on HBO Max and it's sort of embarrassing that I'm 35 and have such a limited knowledge of non-Western movies, so I've been trying to expand my horizons. I thought it was as excellent as everyone says, and I was especially struck by how beautiful the sunlight streaming through the trees was, even though the movie is in black and white.
Toshiro Mifune definitely has a crazy/hot thing going for him that I really like, so next I'll try Yojimbo.
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Post by Hachiman on Dec 7, 2020 21:30:40 GMT -5
Memories of Matsuko
This came out in like 2005 or 2006 during my first time living over here. I recall watching it after I left though and it finally came on Netflix here. Really, I am still feeling like this current decade of Japanese cinema, aside from the output of a few notable directors, has been awful. There was a lot more risk-taking and actual art in the previous decade. In Japan, the collapse of what was looking like a (very unintentional) cinematic renaissance was due to collapse of the home video market and Japanese studios becoming overly reliant on adaptations of established IP starring pop stars or go-to industry talents for as cheaply as possible. Oddly, the films of the 00's were also made cheaply but that was often used to spectacular artistic effect.
Anyway, this certainly isn't a perfect film but it is really affecting and worth a watch if you can find it with subtitles.
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Post by The Stuffingtacular She-Hulk on Dec 8, 2020 9:31:30 GMT -5
The Stuffingtacular She-Hulk If you really want crazy/hot Mifune you have to check out Drunken Angel:
I think the first time we see him in the movie he’s in an aloha shirt, too. It’s really a cool movie that shows you Japan in the immediate postwar period, which is still kind of obscure to a lot of people.
Oh yeah, I'm into this Japanese James Dean look for sure. I'll have to find it! Thanks for the rec. |
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Post by ganews on Dec 8, 2020 16:27:08 GMT -5
Terminator: Dark Fate The best sequel out of the franchise since 2, synthesized from picking over the best elements of all of them including 2 and even the Sarah Connor Chronicles. I wonder what Edward Furlong thinks of his expy getting gunned down in the first five minutes. Michael Biehn's line in the original, "one possible future, I don't know tech stuff", has been one of the most lucrative handwaves in history. Recommended.
The Dead Don't Die It's a Jim Jarmusch movie so you know what you're getting into; only Wes Anderson is more guilty of pulling in his buddies. The most Tom Waits role since The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. HBOMax calls it a spoof, which isn't quite right but what other word could you use.
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Dellarigg
AV Clubber 
This is a public service announcement - with guitars
Posts: 7,621 
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Post by Dellarigg on Dec 8, 2020 17:19:21 GMT -5
Yesterday, I watched Rashomon for the first time, because it was on HBO Max and it's sort of embarrassing that I'm 35 and have such a limited knowledge of non-Western movies, so I've been trying to expand my horizons. I thought it was as excellent as everyone says, and I was especially struck by how beautiful the sunlight streaming through the trees was, even though the movie is in black and white.
Toshiro Mifune definitely has a crazy/hot thing going for him that I really like, so next I'll try Yojimbo.
is an absolute must. Throne Of Blood and The Hidden Fortress too. (George Lucas made a very close study of the latter.) All feature Mifune in peerless form. |
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Post by Nudeviking on Dec 8, 2020 19:01:03 GMT -5
Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion (1997) - Within the first five minutes of this a middle school boy visits his comatose female classmate in a hospital, inadvertently sees her boobs, and proceeds to jerk off. The film that follows is not as bad as this rather inauspicious opening lead me to believe it would be (though the second half of the film is lousy with teen girl/millennia old deity boobs). If you never saw the series this is part of this movie’s going to make no sense at all but if you’ve seen Neon Genesis Evangelion and enjoyed (that can’t be the right word) its mix of giant robots, gore, religious symbolism, body horror and trauma this movie is a fitting close to that series. Also I have to say that putting the end credits in the middle of the movie was a bold choice that I'd like to see more movies get in on.
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Post by haysoos on Dec 10, 2020 12:53:32 GMT -5
The Thin Man It was good! Going to make “Thin Man is a Christmas movie!” the Die Hard meme for the TCM crowd. I just watched "Bell, Book & Candle" the other day and was thinking the same thing. |
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Post by haysoos on Dec 10, 2020 13:06:50 GMT -5
Terminator: Dark Fate The best sequel out of the franchise since 2, synthesized from picking over the best elements of all of them including 2 and even the Sarah Connor Chronicles. I wonder what Edward Furlong thinks of his expy getting gunned down in the first five minutes. Michael Biehn's line in the original, "one possible future, I don't know tech stuff", has been one of the most lucrative handwaves in history. Recommended.
The Dead Don't Die It's a Jim Jarmusch movie so you know what you're getting into; only Wes Anderson is more guilty of pulling in his buddies. The most Tom Waits role since The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. HBOMax calls it a spoof, which isn't quite right but what other word could you use.
Spoof definitely isn't the right word. Deconstruction might be closer. If you really need to give "The Dead Don't Die" a label, it would be a Jarmusch. I really enjoyed most of the movie, although I'm still kind of torn on the ending. It's worth watching just for Tilda Swinton. |
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Post by Prole Hole on Dec 13, 2020 6:07:13 GMT -5
ganews - My Terminator: Dark Fate take if you (or anyone, really) is interested. www.jgmcquarrie.scot/2019/10/terminator-dark-fate.htmlAva (Netflix) - Not quite what I was expecting and not quite how the movie is being marketed. It's being sold as an action movie with some family drama but it's more a family drama interrupted by a few fight sequences every so often. Not that that's bad thing but it was a bit unexpected. Most of the cast are good or great (exception: Common, who looks the part but is a bit wooden) but it's fairly uneven in tone and struggles to pick a direction and stick with it. The world is sketched in pretty thinly and relies of a lot of tropes/stereotypes to do the heavy lifting, setting-wise, and even though the movie is only an hour and a half long it never feels brisk, which is a strange sort of achievement. It gets better as it goes on and even nudges towards "compelling" in its last act but it really needs a good script editor to run over it a few times.
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ABz B👹anaz
Grandfathered In 
This country is (now less of) a shitshow.
Posts: 1,970
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Post by ABz B👹anaz on Dec 13, 2020 12:21:33 GMT -5
ganews - My Terminator: Dark Fate take if you (or anyone, really) is interested. www.jgmcquarrie.scot/2019/10/terminator-dark-fate.htmlAva (Netflix) - Not quite what I was expecting and not quite how the movie is being marketed. It's being sold as an action movie with some family drama but it's more a family drama interrupted by a few fight sequences every so often. Not that that's bad thing but it was a bit unexpected. Most of the cast are good or great (exception: Common, who looks the part but is a bit wooden) but it's fairly uneven in tone and struggles to pick a direction and stick with it. The world is sketched in pretty thinly and relies of a lot of tropes/stereotypes to do the heavy lifting, setting-wise, and even though the movie is only an hour and a half long it never feels brisk, which is a strange sort of achievement. It gets better as it goes on and even nudges towards "compelling" in its last act but it really needs a good script editor to run over it a few times. Awesome write-up on Dark Fate. I loved it too! I saw maybe one ep of the Sarah Connor Chronicles. Is it good enough to try and locate to watch now? |
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Post by Prole Hole on Dec 13, 2020 15:09:44 GMT -5
ganews - My Terminator: Dark Fate take if you (or anyone, really) is interested. www.jgmcquarrie.scot/2019/10/terminator-dark-fate.htmlAva (Netflix) - Not quite what I was expecting and not quite how the movie is being marketed. It's being sold as an action movie with some family drama but it's more a family drama interrupted by a few fight sequences every so often. Not that that's bad thing but it was a bit unexpected. Most of the cast are good or great (exception: Common, who looks the part but is a bit wooden) but it's fairly uneven in tone and struggles to pick a direction and stick with it. The world is sketched in pretty thinly and relies of a lot of tropes/stereotypes to do the heavy lifting, setting-wise, and even though the movie is only an hour and a half long it never feels brisk, which is a strange sort of achievement. It gets better as it goes on and even nudges towards "compelling" in its last act but it really needs a good script editor to run over it a few times. Awesome write-up on Dark Fate. I loved it too! I saw maybe one ep of the Sarah Connor Chronicles. Is it good enough to try and locate to watch now? Why thank you! And yes, Sarah Connor Chronicles stands up well. The second season sags a bit in the middle but pulls it back for a rousing finale, and the first season is a taut, well-constructed piece of television. Definitely recommended. You have to forgive the use of When The Man Comes Around though - hey we all remember that dark time when every TV show in the world was mandated to use it. Mind you there's a fucking kick-ass version of Samson & Delilah (by Garbage) which... wait I'm getting off topic. Yes, watch it! It's PERFECT holiday binge-watch fare! |
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Post by ganews on Dec 16, 2020 11:51:21 GMT -5
Ghost in the Shell (2017) The Scarlett Johansson remake. It was fine. The visuals are really terrific, I can't stress that enough, the sort of thing Blade Runner could only dream of. There was a lot of fine re-creation of scenes from the original. Johansson's acting is passable, not amazing (but she is supposed to be a confused cyborg after all). We can't all be Ryan Gosling. Johansson doesn't have the most range, but between Under the Skin and the MCU I can't think of anyone who could do this role better. The movie suffers a bit from cramming original scenes onto the plot of the original, but at 107 minutes I don't complain too much. I'd probably take this over a Luc Besson movie.
Now the big thing, at least for AV Club diaspora, is the whitewashing issue. Now that I've actually watched the movie (most if not all of the complaint came at the announcement), I find the charge pretty unfair. Mainly because the talk is about Johansson herself in a "Japanese" role, and the movie is working overtime to make this not whitewashing. This Major has an Anglo name, but the whole point is that Motoko Kusanagi, played by a Japanese person, is abducted and put into a synthetic Anglo body with fake memories. The same is true of Michael Pitt. If there is whitewashing afoot, it's in the rest of the cast. There are only three Japanese actors with lines in this Japan. Batou, who got an awesome incarnation from the stylized animation, is played by the Danish Euron Greyjoy.
And what is not technically whitewashing, the Singaporean actor Chin Han grew a mullet to play the (canonically un-modified Japanese everyman) Togusa - but even conscientious Western audiences don't give two shits about the ways movie casting uses Asian actors from different cultures interchangeably.
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Post by Nudeviking on Dec 16, 2020 20:20:16 GMT -5
Iron Man 3 - This showed up on some movie channel's 12 Days of Christmas thing last night on account of it being a Christmas movie and I watched it because I was drinking beers and looking for dumb entertainment. It's easily my favorite Iron Man movie and might be my favorite solo Marvel hero movie (Ragnarok doesn't count because Hulk's there pretty much the entire time and Loki is there the whole time plus you got Valkyrie and Korg & Miek).
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Post by Hachiman on Dec 16, 2020 21:22:52 GMT -5
Iron Man 3 - This showed up on some movie channel's 12 Days of Christmas thing last night on account of it being a Christmas movie and I watched it because I was drinking beers and looking for dumb entertainment. It's easily my favorite Iron Man movie and might be my favorite solo Marvel hero movie (Ragnarok doesn't count because Hulk's there pretty much the entire time and Loki is there the whole time plus you got Valkyrie and Korg & Miek). I wasn't a huge fan of this one, but you raise an interesting point about the solo Marvel hero movies in that few of them are truly solo movies where the hero is alone. Aside from a few of the origin stories, most of them are usually team ups. Would Black Panther count? Or is that cancelled out by virtue of really being an ensemble? Funny enough, I remember at the time that this was a real criticism of this movie, "why not call the other Avengers?" but at this point in the MCU, I would love more movies where heroes are really just taking on solo missions that are more or less self-contained stories. |
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Post by DangOlJimmyITellYouWhat on Dec 16, 2020 21:30:13 GMT -5
Awesome write-up on Dark Fate. I loved it too! I saw maybe one ep of the Sarah Connor Chronicles. Is it good enough to try and locate to watch now? Why thank you! And yes, Sarah Connor Chronicles stands up well. The second season sags a bit in the middle but pulls it back for a rousing finale, and the first season is a taut, well-constructed piece of television. Definitely recommended. You have to forgive the use of When The Man Comes Around though - hey we all remember that dark time when every TV show in the world was mandated to use it. Mind you there's a fucking kick-ass version of Samson & Delilah (by Garbage) which... wait I'm getting off topic. Yes, watch it! It's PERFECT holiday binge-watch fare! I absolutely will not forgive When The Man Comes Around useage in SCC - because there is nothing to forgive as it’s amazing. |
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(which she did hit when talking about the baskets). But you’re right, I was expecting more comedy and less drama.
