What movie have you seen recently?

I’m just waiting for my moviepass to arrive. Should make it so we start bringing our daughter to the theater, since it decreases are overall expense of going to the movies.

Samurai Rebellion

Tragic as all fuck.

I’ve done some catch up with a lot of Oscar hopefuls:

Lady Bird: Current favorite among the front runners. Beautiful slice of life movie that is expertly edited and incredibly well performed. One of the most realistic coming-of-age stories I’ve ever watched. Treats everyone’s individual plotline very elegantly and pulls off some really great dialogue. In my Top 10 for sure.

Call Me by Your Name: I like it, but I can’t say I love it compared to everyone else. Very fascinating queer love story that really explores first love in a deliberately slow and naturalistic way. Really strains your concentration from time to time because there’s just so much Italian scenary they invest in. I also had a problem in that the movie and parents never question the age gap between the two leads. I don’t think it was ever brought up in the book it’s based on, but you can’t help but notice it because Timothée Chalamet looks like a teenager and Armie Hammer is in his 30s. Still, Chalamet is my current front runner for Best Actor and the ending is absolutely amazing.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri: I really want to love this movie, but it’s got problematic elements out the wazoo. It tries to put this equal footing between Frances McDormand as this woman who is on a crusade for her dead daughter and Sam Rockwell as this bumbling, racist, alcholic manchild of a cop and it just doesn’t work. Not as funny as it thinks it is. And comes off so negligent of America’s current racial tension between police officers. All this stuff is plot relevant and hurts the message of the movie a lot for hamfisted drama. Still, the acting across the board is fantastic. Only award support I give the movie is for McDormand alone.

The Disaster Artist: Really let down by this movie. It’s a very abridged, quickly told version of the book that’s so much better and immensely more dense and fascinating. The movie is a lot more about how Tommy is this bizarre, fascinating dreamer rather than he and Greg’s strained but beautiful friendship. Has some really good scenes from the book, but not enough. By the end of it, it just screams out to me that this was James Franco’s vanity project to play Tommy before anyone else. James Franco is great in it, but casting Dave Franco was a mistake, IMO.

The Greatest Showman: This movie is a mess, but I was totally charmed by it. Everyone in the cast is so game and so willing to put it all out there. Half of the songs are amazing and the other half are kinda tepid. The movie would be 100% better if it was “based on” or “inspired by” PT Barnum rather than try to be a biography that it very revisionist of his history. All the stuff about his needy personality hurting his family works, but everything about him being this “champion of the downtrodden” with the freaks feels so unearned. Has some really incredible choreography and set design nonetheless.

Downsizing: Biggest fucking disappointment of the year. It’s three movies forced into one, with the first third being the most mildly interesting but only from a clinical/analytical point of view. The “downsizing” aspect gets very quickly forgotten about. Matt Damon is boring McBlank white person. Hong Chau is the most interesting character, but she plays her accent and role in the movie almost to caricature levels. (Especially during one quote at the end where she says “Fuck” a lot and you are supposed to laugh at her accent.) So badly mismanaged and half-baked. Sadly, it’s one of the worst movies of the year for me.

Everything else is in the genre category that might get nominations (The Big Sick, Get Out, War for the Planet of the Apes, Blade Runner 2049) or movies I have not seen yet. (Shape of Water, I Tonya, The Post, The Florida Project, Molly’s Game)

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In 2017 I watched 37 movies. In some ways it was great year for enjoyable movies. But for new all-time great movies, 2017 was overshadowed by rewatching The Aviator and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

The best run of new movies was probably the Marvel crop, as I really enjoyed all of Captain America: Civil War, Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2, Spiderman: Homecoming and Thor: Ragnarok.

The best non-fiction/documentary movies were The Big Short and Jodorowsky’s Dune.

In other ways 2017 was a great year for TERRIBLE movies. The biggest disappointments:

La La Land had 14 Oscar nominations, but was so bad we walked out the cinema. I think this is the first time I’ve ever walked out a movie I’ve paid to see! Just garbage.

Of course I’d heard bad things, so Suicide Squad was mostly a train-wreck watch, and it didn’t disappoint. As I was hate-watching it, I got to the end of the movie, but otherwise would have stopped watching way earlier.

I started watching The Circle after hearing it come up on the Hello Internet podcast, and had seen it on the on-demand TV in my cabin. I got about 40 minutes though, and knew I wasn’t going to stick with it. Thankfully when I restarted the podcast, the hosts seemed to share my own very low opinion.

Is it possible that Ridley Scott could make a worse Alien movie than Prometheus? Astoundingly, YES. I knew it was probably going to be bad going in, but I didn’t expect Alien Covenant to make a late run at the Most-Garbage-Movie-Luke-Watched-in-2017 award, and win it so convincingly.

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It’s so anonymous, with electronic ticket kiosks, that I have been using my wife’s MoviePass to pay for my kid’s tickets when I take the kid out by myself. It has also made it so I don’t default to the 10AM cheap showings with her. The added flexibility is nice.

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The movie poster for this was really bizarre. Dave looked like he was playing James, sitting with Tommy (played by James) watching the “Disaster Artist”.

Watched a couple of movies on the flight from Tokyo to Warsaw:

Bakuman: I didn’t even know they had made a live action adaptation movie until I saw it in the catalog for the on-board entertainment. It was good enough, though unfortunately the had to make some cuts. I also can’t shake the feeling that the narrative doesn’t really work as a 2 hour movie because a lot of the point of Bakuman is that being a manga artist is really hard and that success isn’t something you can gain overnight unless you are literally an unparalleled genius. I also didn’t really like that they changed Eiji’s character so much, making him a whole lot less likeable and rather a bit of an asshole. Still it was a fine film.

CHIPs: Just put this on to pass the time as the kind of movie I wouldn’t watch in any other setting. Rather bland buddy cop comedy. Also a bunch of the cuts in it were weird which I guess was due to the film being edited for in-flight entertainment (also started watching Gone Girl on my flight to Tokyo, but turned it off because I noticed these kinds of edits and thought it was a film I wanted to see for what it actually is).

A-Team: Similar to CHIPs only put it on because it was there and I didn’t want to think about. Some of the narrative here doesn’t really make sense, but as an adaptation of the old TV series which I used to watch as a kid it was fine enough, and there was really funny one-liners. Nothing to go out of your way to watch but it was entertaining enough for the time.

Rewatched Get Out in a theater. Still fantastic.

Relive that experience in this fantastic thread (spoilers).

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The Post was excellent. Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks were both amazing. Even though this movie wasn’t made in reaction to Trump, it very well could have been. Very timely and highly recommended.

Just got back from The Shape of Water I enjoyed. I really liked the use of ASL because as a bored dude in low level calc with an ASL interpreter I learned a lot of sign, so being able to understand the little nuances of her speech that the subtitles or characters didn’t point out was a real treat.

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Finally feel worthy to publish my Best/Worst List. Haven’t seen everything yet (Missing: Molly’s Game, The Breadwinner, Detroit, All the Money in the World) but I’ve seen everything I want to the best of my ability. Haven’t seen a whole lot of bad movies this year either, but there were many to choose from.

Best Of 2017

  1. Get Out
  2. War for the Planet of the Apes
  3. Baby Driver
  4. Coco
  5. Lady Bird
  6. The Shape of Water
  7. Colossal
  8. The Big Sick
  9. Logan Lucky
  10. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
  11. Thor: Ragnarok
  12. Logan
  13. Loving Vincent
  14. Murder on the Orient Express
  15. I, Tonya
  16. Okja
  17. Atomic Blonde
  18. Captain Underpants
  19. Lego Batman
  20. The Greatest Showman

Worst Films of 2017

  1. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
  2. Bright
  3. The Emoji Movie
  4. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
  5. Downsizing

https://twitter.com/Cyberbunbun/status/960506441240121344

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We spotted Ghost in the Shell (2017) on Amazon Prime so put it on. We turned it off after about 40 minutes. It just wasn’t very good. It seemed to misunderstand the original movie in a way which left me with no confidence that it was worth watching through to the end.

Also I thought I’d just acknowledge the whitewashing of the movie, and not let it effect me. But that didn’t work! Even knowing going in that it would be bad, nothing anyone said about the movie actually prepared me for how bad the whitewashing actually was. I found it continually astounding how the director and producers could make something that seemed sooo racist. Just wow.

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I’d like to hear your thoughts on the new Bladerunner. For confirmation bias purposes.

What does that mean?

I think I posted in this thread my initial thoughts.

Black Panther is one of the best MCU films to date. The ensemble is stunning and I can see so many careers being made from this film. What I came to love about it the most was that this is the most developed sense of worldbuilding I’ve seen in a sci-fi flick in a decade. Wakanda has all this tradition, visual flair, and symbols woven into the fabric of this film that it makes you never want to leave. And the rumors are true, Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger is the best written superhero movie I seen in a while. He was compelling every step of the way. Go see it and experience it ASAP.

I also realized I never watched Caddyshack all the way through. Movie still holds up, hell of a lot better than Animal House. It’s silly, but the performances are really memorable and charming. There’s so many little jokes from the characters that stick pretty well even against the most memorable ones.

Netflix also just added Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story which I haven’t seen in a decade. That still might be one of the most underrated comedies/musicals ever made. I don’t think there’s ever been a parody since Walk Hard that’s been able to match it’s quality. John C. Reilly also has a lovely singing voice, very Roy Orbison like. Plus you can have lots of fun seeing how many cameos appear in this film

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Jim and Andy, the Netflix documentary about Jim Carrey playing Andy Kaufmann, is a very good movie… but about a topic which is so bullshit it almost made me angry. It’s about a multimillionaire actor bullying an entire movie production team, and all the other actors, by never breaking character… and he plays that character as an asshole for the entire time. He’s just a cunt. Over and over. It’s awful.

And because he’s a white male millionaire, nobody calls him on it. Anyone else would be fired for acting even 10% as much of a cunt as him. But he gets away with it because he’s the most powerful person on the movie set. Then he thinks he gets away with it because every claps for him at the wrap party, as though they’re not just appeasing the person who has made their life hell for the last few months as he still has so much power over them. He’s not only fucked with them by acting like that for the movie, but on top of that played awful pranks on them along the way.

The wrestler clocked it immediately. He said that in person Andy was a pleasant guy in private, and they were friends. But Jim didn’t have the understanding that while Andy was crazy on stage, and didn’t stop the act the moment he left the stage so it bled over into moments off stage, he wasn’t a crazy asshole continually. Jim could only play the crazy Andy, as he didn’t have the acting range to not play a continuously crazy asshole.

In the movie, the characters say that pretending to have cancer is a big step too far for Andy… and yet Jim goes there. He pretends to have cancer, and is wheeled around in the wheelchair and carried onto the set. It’s incredibly tasteless.

There seems to be some nods towards this all being a good thing because Andy’s family seemed to approve. But he didn’t act like an asshole towards the family members. Of course not! They didn’t see him putting the whole cast and crew through hell.

Finally, the one scene where I thought Jim had some self-awareness, when talking about the behind-the-scenes footage and that the studio didn’t want it to come out that Jim Carrey was acting like an asshole, it turned out THAT was a prank too. The studios didn’t tell him he was acting like an asshole. But he knew he was being an asshole. He just passed it off as a joke, and continued being more of an asshole.

It might as well have been called “Jim and Andy: the unacknowledged privilege of a white male millionaire”.

Fuck Jim Carrey.

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Black Panther was really good, only complaints I could make about it are the standard ones that are true of most modern movies and I hope we get to see more of Wakanda at some point.
My local old movie double feature over the weekend was Young Frankenstein and The Man with Two Brains. Apparently Young Frankenstein was edited down pretty heavily based on test screenings and it shows but overall it held up a bit better than I was expecting. The Man with Two Brains is a Steve Martin movie and is exactly what you would expect (not very good).

Man with 2 brains? That the one where super rich lady decides to like… have her soul put in a young body then leave her inheritance to that young body but hijinks ensue and rich old lady ends up in steve martin? The movie is literally she controls the left half and he’s got the right?

No, that actually sounds slightly better.