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Post by Jay on Feb 19, 2018 6:11:01 GMT -8
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Post by Zarnium on Feb 19, 2018 10:17:10 GMT -8
I'm amazed that those kids are actually coordinated enough to do that without falling over.
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Post by Jeremy on Feb 20, 2018 19:13:53 GMT -8
So, guess which newly-released film I just saw?
That's right - Early Man, baby!
I've talked about not "getting" British humor in the past, but there are a few exceptions to the rule. Chief among these are the works of Aardman Animations. Chicken Run, Shaun the Sheep, and of course, Wallace and Gromit - their films and shorts are proof that making your audience feel like kids doesn't necessarily need to involve dumbed-down scripts. All it takes is good writing and hoity-toity English accents.
Even the weakest of Aardman films are worth a good chuckle. And... yeah, Early Man is one of their weakest. The plot is painfully generic (Underdog sports team vs. world champions? Where haven't I seen that before?), and not all the jokes land as well as they should. But the story provides an amusing riff on the European Bronze Age, told in a charming stop-motion style that leaves plenty of room for good visual humor.
(And yeah, yeah, I'll see Black Panther next week. Just let me enjoy the caveman cartoon, okay?)
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Post by ThirdMan on Feb 21, 2018 2:10:06 GMT -8
Having just seen Paddington 2, I can say with the utmost certainty that the reason it's drawing such rave reviews is due to its harrowing and unflinching depiction of the UK prison system. Anyways, the first one's art direction borrowed pretty heavily from the work of Wes Anderson, so naturally this, with its wacky prison setting, certainly evokes aspects of The Grand Budapest Hotel, minus that film's streaks of dark humour, of course. Hugh Grant gives a pretty loopy, inspired performance as the villain, and Sally Hawkins is as adorable as ever (possibly even more so than in The Shape of Water). The film has a really clean screenplay, terrific cinematography, and all the character work is on point. The 100% RT rating doesn't come as much of a surprise when you consider, really, why anyone would possibly be so churlish as to pan it, because outside of the two child actors perhaps being rather underutilized, there's little to quibble with here. So, yeah, fear not, the critics aren't drinking the marmalade.
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Post by Jeremy on Feb 21, 2018 14:14:00 GMT -8
See, I would've totally watched Paddington 2 yesterday if my theater was still carrying it, but they've shunted it off to make room for more Black Panther showings. (Or maybe they just don't want to screen more than one quirky British family film at a time.)
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Post by Jeremy on Feb 24, 2018 20:11:07 GMT -8
I watched The Breadwinner. Really liked it. It's probably my favorite animated film of 2017, or at least in close competition with Lego Batman.
The premise initially feels like "Mulan in the Middle East," but the story is told with a surprising amount of dramatic weight, and turns quite riveting near the climax. The animation is simple (hand-drawn characters and painted backdrops, albeit computer-enhanced), but gorgeous to look at, as are a series of 2-D stop-motion interludes which punctuate the narrative.
Coco is probably going to win the Oscar without breaking a sweat, but I'd be fine with this film pulling an upset victory. (Hey, it happened with Moonlight...)
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Mar 15, 2018 3:19:06 GMT -8
Speaking of, Jeremy , you are a heartless monster for not loving Coco, which I just watched and loved. Yes, it had the mandatory "oh no our protagonist will fall to their death lol no character swoops out of nowhere to save them" scene that every animated film must have (see Toy Story 3, Wreck-It Ralph, etc). Yes, one of the big twists is painfully obvious. But I did not expect it to hit me in the gut. Which it did. Repeatedly. (Also Jaime Camil was in it-- playing a regular schmo for once!! Talk about stunt casting!!)
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Post by Jeremy on Mar 15, 2018 5:14:11 GMT -8
Seems like there's a lot of folks who think I was too harsh on Coco. In fairness, it did hit me in the gut near the end, albeit not repeatedly. I'll probably revisit it once it pops up on Netflix, and see if my opinion improves when the hype machine isn't quite so loud.
In the meantime, you can have your revenge by watching The Greatest Showman and telling me how wrong I am for liking it.
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Post by Jay on Mar 28, 2018 9:25:21 GMT -8
Annihilation (2018)
Being a film that's thematically about cancer, mutation, and genetics, it may be helpful for me to do a little sequencing of what I see as the genetic predecessors in film.
At first, the characters proved a little bit hard to get into for me. I couldn't figure out what my emotional in-route was supposed to be as everything human in it seemed to be played muted, but the scenery was rather vivid and engaging. About fifteen minutes in, it dawned on me: "Oh, I'm watching a Tarkovsky film!" The consensus seems to be that Stalker is the main influence here, but in my case, I uh... haven't seen Stalker... (I'm sorry)... So my thought was Solaris, which seemed to get at the cyclical nature of certain aspects of the film as well as its inherent subjectivity in perspective.
From there, other influences drew in and I made some other, somewhat lazy comparisons. While there are a few named dudes in the cast, the crew of the expedition as we see it is entirely women. Women dealing with dark pasts, loss of loved ones, recovering from trauma in a foreign, isolated, and hostile environment. Ergo, The Descent.
The last comparison is another one rather obvious to be made: Object crashes down from space, turns out to be sentient, has the capacity to take over and manipulate nearby lifeforms to its own ends, thus, The Thing. It's perhaps one of the more lazy comparisons insofar as the settings (Antartica vs. a semi-tropical swamp area) couldn't be more different and our pal Thing seemed more overtly malicious and destructive, but it's hard to look at the first few moments of the film and an alien involved in genetic manipulation and not have that particular comparison come to mind.
I suppose all of this would indicate that I thought the movie was derivative. Well, yes, and not exactly. I think it makes a kind of sense that given the film's preoccupations, it would be cribbing from other thrillers in spots. A few things work in its favor to help make it distinctive.
One would be the visuals. It's really a pretty film, likely worth seeing on the big screen, which makes it stupid that Paramount and the producer got into a spat and that it was quickly pulled from many theatres in favor of putting on Netflix but quick. Word is that Paramount didn't like the ending and the producer insisted on final cut, so if there are no showtimes near you, that would be why. Seems asinine that Paramount would be so petty as to hamstring the project they financed because the ending didn't test well with focus groups, but then I'm not in marketing? More to the point, you'll have plenty of interesting stuff to look at throughout, which is a plus, as it's not really a dialogue-heavy film and is more into the atmosphere (I'll add that they get the titular line in and lordy is it jammed in there). If you pay close attention to certain symbols and patterns, you can piece together what's going on as you go through it, which is a nice bonus.
A second point in its favor would be a degree of restraint that it shows. Given the R-rating and the early blood, I thought the film was going to go full slasher on me. Incidentally, I was sitting there at one point thinking "oh man, this isn't going to be another Sunshine is it? Where the previous team went crazy and now is out to kill the current team?" Thankfully, it did not, but as it turns out, the comparison was accurate, as the writer/director for Annihilation is Alex Garland, who wrote Sunshine, which I didn't like, and 28 Days Later, which I did. Annihilation is more into creeping you out, though there are a couple of gory deaths sprinkled in. Nevertheless, not a slasher! Worthy of an R-rating for violence though.
A third point would be, for lack of a better term, the versatility of the themes. It's got its main current running through ideas of cancer and programmed cell death and genetic variation, and you can certainly run with that, but the understory so to speak is psychological and plays out a version of nature vs. nurture and whether we are what we intended to be or what outside sources shaped us into without our knowing it. Another less explicit aspect would be the ecological, as The Shimmer itself and other things within it have that oily rainbow slick to them, and taking place in a state park or nature preserve, you start to think about the influences of man on nature, or alien as a surrogate for man in this case. It also has a meta-film element in that there are frequent, convenient for plotting leaps in time where the characters get somewhere but can't remember how due to memory lapses and interference inside.
It's a pretty good film, not great as such, but I'd be happy to watch it again with someone as it's close enough on a lot of points. It's not moody in the same way Tarkovsky can be, but it's certainly ponderous and seems to have a balance of action and scenery. That being said, characterization is a little laser-focused on the main character. Then again, movies of this sort, when is it not? It's a sci-fi horror thing, you're going to have a main character and a love interest as your line in and hope to get something else of interest from one of the other characters, something to think about, some scenery to chew through.
Also, were I capable of drawing and doing a Mad Magazine-style parody-as-feature? With all the talk of evolution and mutation, I would totally portray each successive dangerous animal encounter as a stage in Pokemon development.
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Post by ThirdMan on Mar 28, 2018 18:22:05 GMT -8
I saw the film a few weeks ago, agree with most of your points here, and also haven't seen Stalker, but was reminded of Tarkovsky's Solaris.
Some folks on Letterboxd whose opinions I respect thought highly of it, and I quite enjoyed Garland's previous film, Ex Machina, so I gave it a look.
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Post by Jeremy on Mar 28, 2018 18:44:23 GMT -8
As I recall, the book that Annihilation is based on (which is quite good, incidentally) never names any of the main characters (instead referring to them as "the biologist," "the psychologist," etc). That adds an emotional distance to the story that makes it just a little creepier. Give that the film version names the women, and is, y'know, much more visual, I'm a little concerned that it loses some of that eerie dissonance.
But, the reception does seem very positive. I'll probably catch it on DVD. (Also, how come the rest of the world is already getting it on Netflix? I call foul.)
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Post by Jay on Mar 28, 2018 18:59:38 GMT -8
Garland's adaptation was allegedly a loose one, where he didn't even directly consult the book, just generally recalled feelings he had while reading it. I took a gander at the Wikipedia page for the book and it seems pretty divergent as a whole (for one thing, the titular line had a reason for being there!).
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Post by ThirdMan on Mar 28, 2018 19:23:32 GMT -8
The film just hasn't had that much support from its studio, Jeremy, so the international rights were sold directly to Netflix. And even there, I've heard it hasn't been advertised well.
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Post by Jeremy on Mar 28, 2018 19:47:57 GMT -8
It was in and out of my local theater pretty quickly, which indicates that it's not a film that was easy to market. Based on the strange tone of the book, I can see why.
It's just too bad I've got to wait a few more months to watch it, unlike the rest of the world. Black Panther aside, there haven't been too many films so far this year that have caught my attention. (I'm hoping that changes as we get into spring and inch towards summer.)
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Post by ThirdMan on Mar 29, 2018 1:48:52 GMT -8
John Krasinski's arty horror film, A Quiet Place, co-starring his wife, Emily Blunt, seems to be getting very good reviews thus far. That it runs a lean 90 minutes is promising, as these types of films can overstay their welcome when they push the two-hour-plus mark.
And, of course, there's ISLE OF DOGS. Wes Anderson's coming off what's arguably the best film of his career, and really delivered the goods with his last stop-motion-animated feature, Fantastic Mr. Fox. I, of course, won't wade into the "cultural appropriation" jibber-jabber until I've seen the film. Chances are it won't deeply offend me as it seems to have all the "woke" (ugh) folks out there. If it's meant as a loving homage to Japanese cinema, I'll receive it on those terms.
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