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Post by Incandescence 112 on Jan 18, 2018 22:21:13 GMT -8
No new opinions from me. But having re-watched Dunkirk today, I will note that it remains masterful. The character is in the filmmaking, folks, and this thing is stunning and richly-detailed. Also considerably less loud on Blu-Ray than in IMAX. I re-watched it yesterday as well! Those dog-fighting sequences are truly sublime.
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Post by ThirdMan on Jan 19, 2018 15:14:36 GMT -8
It's just so elegantly framed, so artfully-composed.
And to whatever extent Nolan has to use CGI, he does it pretty much flawlessly. I think there's only one so-so visual effects shot in the entire film (when we see Hardy's plane gliding down over the beach from its left side...it just wasn't blended well with the background).
It's been a really good year for cinematography, and I'd be fine with this, Blade Runner 2049, or The Shape of Water taking home the Oscar in that category. All feature spectacular work.
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Post by unkinhead on Jan 21, 2018 21:24:15 GMT -8
Just watched The Big Sick . Pretty great actually. "What's your stance on 9/11?" "Oh....anti. It was a real tragedy, I mean, we lost 19 of our best guys."
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Post by Jeremy on Jan 22, 2018 10:46:33 GMT -8
Yeah, that line was great. (And I say that as someone who rarely laughs at 9/11 jokes.) The Big Sick surprised me in how charming and funny it was.
Last night, spurred by the buzz about the upcoming spinoff, I watched Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven for the first time. It's a fun film, but it felt kind of dramatically empty, particularly given the onscreen talent involved. The feud between Danny Ocean and the Andy Garcia character never really caught fire, and just felt like an easy peg to hang a heist movie on. It's enjoyable for a single watch, particularly the third act, but it's not a film I'm rushing to revisit.
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Post by ThirdMan on Jan 22, 2018 17:48:08 GMT -8
The film is fluff -- just an excuse for Soderbergh and the actors to screw around in Vegas -- but you'd be surprised how well it actually holds up to repeat viewings. It's become a staple on cable for that very reason.
My favourite Soderbergh is probably The Limey, with Terrence Stamp.
I thought The Big Sick was enjoyable, but I wish it had some degree of visual ambition to take it up a notch. It felt a tad sitcomy at times. Also, to me, Nanjiani didn't have the greatest chemistry with Kazan, so I guess it's fortunate he spent most of his time with Romano and Hunter.
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Post by Jeremy on Jan 22, 2018 18:08:16 GMT -8
Of the Soderbergh films I've seen (admittedly, not many), my favorite is probably Out of Sight. Which, come to think of it, probably makes better use of George Clooney's "charismatic thief" than Ocean's Eleven does.
I'll watch the other two Ocean's films soon. As you say, they show up on cable a lot, so they're easy to catch.
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Post by ThirdMan on Jan 22, 2018 18:56:00 GMT -8
Some folks hate hate hate Ocean's Twelve, because it winks to the audience to a ridiculous degree (see: the scene with Julia Roberts and Bruce Willis), but I think it has some interesting style.
Out of Sight came out the same year as The Limey, and is also amongst my favourite Soderbergh films. 1998 was a good year for the director. BTW, Out of Sight was based off an Elmore Leonard novel. Other notable '90s films based off the famed crime writer's work: Get Shorty (1995), by Barry Sonnenfeld, and Jackie Brown (1997), by Quentin Tarantino. The latter features Michael Keaton playing the same character he did in Out of Sight.
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Post by Jeremy on Jan 22, 2018 19:17:39 GMT -8
Wow, that's a deeper Leonard connection than I'd thought. I knew Out of Sight was based off one of his novels - Jennifer Lopez's character was later spun off into her own TV series (where she was played by Carla Gugino), and her character also showed up years later on an episode of Justified (which was also based on a Leonard story).
So, um... Jackie Brown apparently takes place in the same universe as Justified. You heard it here first.
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Post by Jeremy on Jan 23, 2018 17:33:53 GMT -8
I saw Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, and it's a ton of fun. The Rock and Kevin Hart continue to have great onscreen chemistry, and Jack Black delivers his funniest performance in years (playing a teenage girl in a grown man's body). The whole cast seems to be enjoying themselves, even Nick Jonas (who, admittedly, was never my favorite Jonas brother).
The film toys around with its video-game setting - there are all sorts of allusions to stock characters and exposition - and it's got a breezy tone that lets the two hours fly by. Not deep by any stretch, but proof that Hollywood can still make a fun action-adventure film without putting a superhero in the title.
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Post by ThirdMan on Jan 23, 2018 20:28:00 GMT -8
Well, clearly the word-of-mouth on the film has been good, given the amount of continued business it's done. I never saw the previous buddy comedy with The Rock and Kevin Hart, but I haven't found Hart to be funny in anything I've seen him in, especially his recent SNL appearance, which gets my vote for worst of the season (a lot of that's on the material he was given, mind you). That said, I'll probably give Jumanji 2 a look when it gets to home video.
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Post by Jeremy on Jan 23, 2018 20:49:27 GMT -8
It's pretty incredible that Jumanji is still topping the box office a solid month after its premiere, particularly considering that it debuted in the shadow of The Last Jedi. But January has always been a slow period for new films.
Regarding SNL, I didn't quite mind the Kevin Hart episode, although I admittedly did not watch the full thing. But the most recent episode (with Jessica Chastain, an actress I usually like) was just awful. A couple of halfway-decent sketches, but they were overwhelmed by an endless series of duds.
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Post by ThirdMan on Jan 23, 2018 21:31:42 GMT -8
I think the two best episodes of the season have been Saoirse Ronan and Sam Rockwell. Re: Chastain, sometimes it seems like actors treat the show as an opportunity to play the broadest caricatures imaginable, when they should really just be trying to come up with clever premises.
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Post by Jeremy on Jan 24, 2018 6:09:58 GMT -8
I think it also helps if the host has prior experience with comedy. Like, Jessica Chastain never appears in films where she says lines like "David...!"
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Post by ThirdMan on Jan 25, 2018 12:39:49 GMT -8
Saw Phantom Thread yesterday. It has a lot in common, thematically, with Darren Aronofsky's mother!, but is less forceful in its approach. And that's not an opinion, but a fact.
It's probably one of my three favourite films of the year.
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Post by unkinhead on Jan 27, 2018 0:05:53 GMT -8
Saw Phantom Thread as well. I thought it was fantastic. Sort of spoilers below.
Y'know every time I think of PTA and his relatively young age and his style as portrayed in Boogie Nights and Magnolia, I think "He's so great, though I feel he's got a tendency of flashiness to him, impatience, maybe excess exuberance". Don't get me wrong, the frenetic energy in Boogie Nights makes it what it is, and Magnolia works better with a lack of restraint. Still, it somehow surprises me every time then when I watch There Will Be Blood or his latest: Phantom Thread, in which I'm bewildered by his patience and restraint. It's hard to believe it's the same director, but the craftsmanship of course remains constant, it could be none other.
Outside of filmmaking craft, I've always appreciated PTA's intelligence with regards to human behavior. He gets people, especially self-destructive and obsessive ones. So it was hard to wipe a huge grin off my face watching Daniel Day Lewis's Hancock strut around displaying subtle and not-so-subtle narcissistic traits, humor intended or not, it was a joy to watch. It is all rather comical when you have the comfort of fiction as a barrier between you and a nutjob, what's so funny is how realistic he (Woodcock) is, and the absurdity of his disguised adolescent behavior. A "baby" as Alma once characterized him as. Perhaps even more impressive though is his characterization of Alma, an even more subtle yet equally disturbing portrait of codependency and pathological behavior. It's rather beautiful, and the way PTA exposes its consuming and cyclical nature is both rewarding and rather intense.
Phantom Thread is kind of thematically akin to exploring the psychological aspects of BDSM without any actual sex. A manifestation that affects daily living rather than some escapist fantasy, although are they really all that separable? Wisdom would suggest very likely not.
If I have any criticism it's probably the "mother" appearing as a delusion. I mean, it's almost too subtle and detached from the rest of the narrative to feel in-place. It obviously makes sense as a psychological 'explanation', but it's kind of...idk, odd. If you don't get it, it adds really nothing to the narrative flow or tone, if you do get it, it just seems like a weird one-off out-of-place "hey this is his Freudian thing". Perhaps PTA thought coming right out and saying "hey this is a Freudian thing" isn't subtle enough, but I'd take a cogent narrative inlay of such a thought over a strangely sparse inclusion of the idea. No half measures. Still, this is a really odd complaint of a brief scene in an otherwise great film, and it fails to mention that the scene in question is quite striking in isolation (her appearing suddenly and all).
Good Stuff.
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