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Post by otherscott on Jan 4, 2024 11:14:41 GMT -8
I bet you didn't have me starting this thread on your bingo card!
Anyways, I wanted to talk about I'm Thinking of Ending Things, a Kaufman movie from 2020. Kaufman made one of my personal favourite movies, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and I knew this particular one was divisive.
First off, I want to say this was a good movie. In terms of construction and being a piece of art, it's well done, but there's just a couple of things that really don't work about it for me.
The first is that the movie feels almost irresponsibly pro-suicide. It's more artful and subtle in this way than something like 13 Reasons Why, but the movie is constantly making arguments about how life never gets better and only worse, and there is a way to stop time from moving forward, etc etc without any real counter to why life has value. That's a valid opinion from an artistic perspective, but it just makes me uncomfortable thinking of people who are struggling with depression watching this movie and have it only pull them deeper into it.
The second is a spoiler so I'll put it in the gray text: The movie doing a switcharoo on who the main character actually is does not really work while you are watching the movie. For someone like me, who is watching a movie this artistic and full of symbology and metaphor and trying to put the meaning together, that sort of misdirection makes the majority of your considerations during the first watch feel wasted. I think you can put together what the movie was truly saying after the fact, which is fine, but I didn't see value in the misdirection.
So I do recommend the movie to anyone who is not struggling with mental issues because it is an interesting piece of work and something that I think will stick with me and make me think about for a while.
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Post by Jeremy on Jan 7, 2024 15:31:07 GMT -8
Haven't watched I'm Thinking of Ending Things since it was first released, and I could not reasonably explain the ending or its messaging if you paid me, but I've come to settle on two broad points about the film:
1. I think the divisive reaction to the film (I was kind of lukewarm to it myself, but I saw a lot of online reactions from people who outright hated it) is a byproduct of the film having a much wider and more accessible release than Kaufman's other films - dropping on Netflix during the heat of Covid - while also being perhaps his least accessible film in story and style. Plenty more people watched this film than, say, Adaptation by dint of it being front and center on the world's largest streaming platform, when it's in fact the kind of cerebral indie that would never attract a mass audience with a traditional theatrical release.
2. I like Charlie Kaufman a lot, but I don't think it's a coincidence that the two films of his that I care the least for (IToET and Synecdoche, New York) are also two of his only scripts where he himself is in the director's chair. He seems to do better when there's another (talented) perspective like Michel Gondry or Spike Jonze to provide a counterbalance and keep his ideas from getting too unwieldy. (Then again, Kaufman also directed Anomalisa, which I like a great deal. Stop-motion psychodrama FTW.)
In any event, I am very much looking forward to Kaufman's upcoming DreamWorks cartoon; hopefully he does as good a job as Noah Baumbach did with Madagascar 3.
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Post by Jay on Jan 8, 2024 20:42:21 GMT -8
Hi? I think it's been a year plus since I've been in. It's been something.
Anyway....
Evil Dead Rise (2023)
Probably outside of Ghostbusters, the film franchise that I'll hold the most opinions on is Evil Dead. It's been such a weird and subversive enterprise since it first kicked off, shifting along the way from gross-out horror played mostly straight to "splatstick," as it's been termed. For the most part, the legacy of that comedic turn was picked up by Ash vs. Evil Dead whereas the more horror elements were reserved for the silver screen. If I were to characterize the reboot of a decade+ ago (which I saw first on mute in a bar), I would say that it had some strong ideas by making the demonic possession parallel to the lead's drug addiction, but Fede Alvarez was missing something unique to the franchise's conception of demonic monsters, namely, that after untold millennia of being formless creatures, they were jazzed about being in bodies again and behaved in a way that relished not only killing but the novelty of physical sensations. Instead, his deadites were mostly violent for the shock value of it all and lacked any of the uncanny humor.
That's back in this one, which is a positive, and the shocking aspects of the violence are retained, as you end up seeing each scene scattered with various Chekov's Implements of Destruction. I would say that it also has "ideas" in that it tries to make it about family or even possibly generational trauma. It even shifts up the formula by putting it in a decrepit and soon to be torn down apartment building in LA as opposed to some Appalachian cabin. Some of those could be true positives, if executed well. Unfortunately, the end product just isn't there. To really do right by a generational trauma narrative, you have to establish the characters, and while director Lee Cronin has a pacing more like Cronenberg, it's hard to pull off those dynamics in 90 minutes-- especially when you have a wholly superfluous frame to the story that chews up nearly ten minutes while providing nothing in return. Additionally, while taking its title and themes from a notoriously tricky and unpredictable franchise, it backs itself into a corner by having children as most of the primary cast. Recognizing that it's been... good lord, almost twenty years since Zack Snyder opened his version of Dawn of the Dead with a subversion that (FTR, didn't like that one either, have opinions on ... of the Dead broadly), to be imitated later in The Walking Dead's 2010 pilot, Cronin adheres to convention there and steers towards the obvious outcomes.
Rise wears its influences on its sleeve, with plenty of sugary and unfilling easter eggs calling back to the franchise's earlier days. When it tries to switch up the material, that only draws attention to how much more clever its forebears were.
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Post by Jeremy on Jan 10, 2024 15:25:41 GMT -8
I thought Evil Dead Rise was fine, but I agree that featuring a lot of kids in the cast does somewhat constrict the film's horror trappings. There's only so much you can get away with in a major American horror film, and audiences know it.
There was a recent horror film called When Evil Lurks made in Argentina (streaming on Shudder in the US), and it... does not pull any punches, even when it comes to the child characters. Was pretty shocking, and not the sort of thing you'd usually see in major horror flicks. (The movie did make me laugh at various points, probably because I'm a sociopath.)
Speaking of shocking movies, I just watched Saltburn, the new class-minded thriller from Emerald Fennell. Some good casting and great cinematography, but it's one of those movies that tries to shock without doing anything shocking below a surface level. There are a number of gross-out scenes in this, but they mainly just provoke in a standard "Ew, gross!" level without hitting much deeper, and the film's messaging - inspired by Parasite and other horrors-of-capitalism movies of its ilk - is pretty shallow. (The shock factor undercuts the ending, too, with a "twist" ending that isn't much of a twist.)
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Post by Jay on Jan 10, 2024 17:17:07 GMT -8
Sociopathy? I remember time was when we could barely get you to watch a horror movie. Still, that sounds interesting, and another reason to consider getting a Shudder sub aside from watching Nic Cage ham it up in Color Out of Space.
I'd probably give Evil Dead Rise a 6 or 7 out of 10, which was about what you gave it from what I saw. I'm pretty critical even about the stuff I like.
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Post by Jeremy on Jan 11, 2024 15:27:09 GMT -8
Yeah, I have Evil Dead Rise as a 6/10 - was almost a 7, but it was missing the humor I had come to expect from the ED series. I watched the original trilogy for the first time last year, in preparation for the new film, and I just loved how bonkers they were ( Evil Dead 2 in particular). Rise was fine but isn't the kind of film I'll be thinking about often. Sociopathy? I remember time was when we could barely get you to watch a horror movie. Yeah, my tolerance levels have shifted over time, at least when it comes to violence/gore. Blumhouse got me on the horror wavelength a few years back, and then A24 locked it in place. It's an agreeable genre because even bad horror movies are (usually) entertaining to watch. Plus, it's fun to challenge myself to see just how scared a movie can make me feel. (I watched the original Black Christmas this week, and while I can't say it's truly terrifying, the last 20 minutes are very tense and well-crafted. The days of landlines...)
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Post by Jeremy on Jan 22, 2024 10:22:41 GMT -8
I watched Killers of the Flower Moon the other day. It's well-shot and vividly renders a forgotten piece of American history, with very good work from the three leads, but narratively it feels... messy. The story should be focused on Mollie, who is the obvious emotional center (helped by Lily Gladstone giving perhaps the film's best performance), but instead the script pivots more on Ernest, an uncompelling lead whose motivations are spelled out early on (as is the general premise, for some reason).
It's also fatally overlong, more problematically so than Scorcese's previous film. At least with The Irishman, the scope was both fine-tuned and sweeping, following one guy's life over several decades. KotFM, by contrast, doesn't have a clear or compelling central focus, and takes place over a relatively brief time period (apart from that weird jump near the end). Just kind of a slog after a while.
I also watched The Beekeeper, which is about half the length of KotFM with twice the body count and ten times the bad jokes. It's a fairly straightforward check-your-brain-in action thriller - "what if John Wick but with bee jokes?" and a decent one at that. After 25 years of action stardom, you'd expect Jason Statham to feel checked out, but he's just as committed to the silliness as ever. The script doesn't quite accommodate him as much as it could have - I was hoping for more bee puns, and perhaps more than one fight set in an apiary - but it's goofy fun, with some solid action scenes and a hilariously stupid third-act reveal.
And the new Mean Girls film - a musical version, adapted from the Broadway production that was itself adapted from the 2004 movie - is watchable, but feels weirdly at odds with itself. The tone of the original doesn't really work as a Broadway-style musical (at least on film, I haven't seen it on stage), which becomes obvious when what were funny jokes in the original film are now undermined by theatrical numbers with no real sense of irony. The young cast is fine, with Angourie Rice (of The Nice Guys) pretty good in the Lindsay Lohan role, and there are some creative tactics employed to update the story for the social media age. But overall, this doesn't hold a candle to the original.
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Post by otherscott on Jan 23, 2024 8:52:08 GMT -8
I'm also relatively cool on KOTFM, but I think the character focus on Ernest makes sense. There's a real lack of agency to the Osage women in the film, which makes a focus difficult for large parts of the movie, but that is also probably what leads to some of the narrative frustration of the movie I had.
I suppose one way you could do this movie is have the focus on Molly and make the movie much more centered on the first part where she is courting Ernest, but then you end up rushing through the parts of the movie where the real climax is.
Either way, someone either needs to give Scorsese an editor or he needs to embrace episodic storytelling.
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Post by ThirdMan on Jan 23, 2024 9:17:07 GMT -8
Scorsese probably would've had great difficulty getting financing for the film with a relative unknown as the lead. Yes, even with his reputation in the industry, studios don't just hand over hundreds of millions of dollars (the film was reportedly budgeted at $200 million!) to him all willy-nilly. So he went with a (commercially-) proven commodity in frequent-collaborator DiCaprio, to get it greenlit.
At any rate, the length didn't bother me on this movie, as I thought the relative pacing was generally fine. I've seen plenty of 90-minute films that dragged way more for me than KotFM did. It's not my absolute favourite of the year, but it's definitely produced better than most films I saw in 2023,
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Post by Jeremy on Jan 23, 2024 19:01:04 GMT -8
Oh, I totally get that the movie probably couldn't have been made without DiCaprio (he's one of the few remaining movie stars who can command a $200 million budget for a film not based on major IP); I just think the story should have focused a bit less on his character, especially since said character is kind of a doofus. (I assume Leo would have gotten top billing either way.) I'm not sure this would have fixed some of the film's other pacing issues, but it might have left me less cold in the end.
I should add that on average, I tend to be less enamored with Scorsese's films than most people - the only movies of his I've seen that I fully clicked with are The Departed and The King of Comedy.
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Post by ThirdMan on Jan 24, 2024 12:46:14 GMT -8
Well, I mean, Scorsese mostly operates in genres that you're not overly fond of (especially the Crime genre, though this was sort of a Western with Crime elements), so that's to be expected. (I like The Departed, BTW, but wouldn't rank it amongst his very best. It winning Best Picture was more of a Lifetime Achievement Oscar for Scorsese than anything else, IMO.) As for DiCaprio's character, yeah, he's a doofus, but I think it's one of those actor things where they find it more satisfying/challenging if they're playing a character that isn't inherently likeable, and whatnot. The audience certainly isn't meant to sympathize with him, or anything.
Anyways, I thought the way the film revealed what happened in later years, with a sort of Prairie Home Companion setting, was a rather clever and original way of doing things. Most films would've just used text on a black screen with a few still images of the real-life people to do that.
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Post by Jeremy on Jan 25, 2024 12:30:03 GMT -8
Yeah, I thought the ending was clever, and an interesting subversion of expectations. (I've seen some people draw comparisons to Wes Anderson, but it's only like the fourth- or fifth-Wessiest production I've seen in the past year.) I found Scorsese's self-casting to be a step too far, perhaps a little on-the-nose - I know he often cameos in his own movies, but not quite this to such an obvious or distracting degree.
In a weird coincidence, I watched Quiz Show last night, and was surprised to see that Scorsese plays a role in that movie as the cranky ad executive. I didn't even recognize him at first - just thought, 'Who is that Scorsese-ish fellow?' in part because I'm not used to him as an actor. (That's an issue that probably dates back to him playing a pufferfish in Shark Tale.)
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Post by Jeremy on Jan 28, 2024 18:19:05 GMT -8
I caught American Fiction in a theater, which turned out to be the right way to see it. It's a genuinely funny film, satirizing racial politics and cultural disconnection in a way that's both perceptive and anti-woke, and the audience laughed out loud at various points. (A nice change of pace from Mean Girls a few weeks back; my audience was pretty dead silent for that one.) The film is perhaps a little too easy in the targets it chooses, and the main character's family drama (which eats up about a third of the runtime) never quite catches fire. But the script is witty and clever, and the performances - particularly from Jeffrey Wright and Sterling K. Brown - are great. Solid film debut from writer-director Cord Jefferson, who's already made quite a name for himself in prestige TV (Watchmen, Succession, Master of None, The Good Place).
Wonka, on the other hand, was kind of disappointing, especially considering the pedigree of director Paul King, who previously scored a pair of bullseyes with the Paddington films. The set design and score are nice, but the original songs (of which there are quite a few) mostly miss the mark, especially in comparison to the tunes reprised from the 1971 Willy Wonka film. Timothy Chalamet also feels miscast - his Wonka is too polite and wide-eyed to feel like the manipulative sociopath who would grow up to torment children in his deathtrap of a factory. There are some enjoyable supporting performances, with Hugh Grant stealing every scene as an Oompa-Loompa. But the parts don't blend into a satisfying confection. (Also, I lost count of how many times the word "chocolate" is used in the script, but... it's a lot. Man, it is a lot.)
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Post by ThirdMan on Jan 28, 2024 22:30:13 GMT -8
It seems like a lot of people feel that being "woke" is somehow worse than being racist/bigoted. Like, any time someone calls someone out for saying something that's clearly racist or xenophobic, there's a very strong chance they'll get labeled "woke" in response. Which is to say, the word "woke" is bandied about way too carelessly these days.
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Post by Jeremy on Jan 29, 2024 15:38:04 GMT -8
Yeah, the word is overused these days, to the point where it sometimes just becomes a reactionary term to whatever people don't like. It's hard to settle on a concrete definition, but I typically see "woke" as shorthand for "performative politics" - e.g. a "woke" film would be one where the script features easy and obvious political messaging designed to validate/anger rather than directly challenge the viewers.
American Fiction is not an anti-woke film in the sense of being a reactionary film; it's more along the lines of Atlanta, a show which engages in racial satire by skewering both black culture and white liberal stereotypes. There are some Atlanta episodes that feel like they were written in the Daily Wire studio, but that's less a result of conservative coding than a sense of self-awareness and introspection in the production.
(I think I've mentioned this before, but I generally find political comedy more potent and interesting when writers mock their own side, especially in an era when the two sides have a more facile view of each other than ever. This is why something like Bodies Bodies Bodies, even at its surface, is inherently funnier than Lady Ballers, a film designed to pander to an audience that already agrees with it.)
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