The Blockbuster Oscar Bait Movie Thread

[LadyCrimson]

Forgot to mention that we did watch "The Mule."
Not one of Eastwood's better directorial films. I was very slightly disappointed. It's not bad, and had some funny moments, just not quite up to his past efforts, especially the family-drama bits. Overall doesn't make as much of impact as his others. It did make me read up on the actual old man the film is based on/inspired by. The film condenses the time frame somewhat, from the real case, I think.

[Blarghagh]

Godzilla - King of Monsters... There was a lot of brouhaha about critic and audience dissonance with this flick, where critics were like "it lacked the human element, there was too much monsters" and audiences were like "that's why we're here, idiots!”.

This left me prepared to hate the people in it, but woefully unprepared for how freaking awful the monster stuff is. No redeeming features whatsoever.

[Gromnir]

On 9/9/2019 at 5:45 AM, Amentep said:

Marvel has seven Captain Marvels(!) so its understandable as to why they discussion of them can be confusing (and that's without even bringing in the two non-Marvel Captain Marvels).

I do think that there is sometimes a pull in media to try and present female characters as less flawed than similar male characters for fear that they aren't representing women well by creating a flawed character.  That said I think with Wonder Woman there's only so much room to maneuver in terms of the character and flaws. Carol Danvers has a hugely messed up backstory that in the comics has allowed her to be a flawed character when they transitioned her into the Captain Marvel role, but in the movie she mostly comes off as stubborn (but right to be stubborn) a trait she shares with Rey so far in the Star Wars films.

carol danver's backstory is a bit o' a mess, but the advantage o' such is the movie folks coulda' taken whatever they wanted from the chaos. missed opportunity.  

we didn't hate the ww film. however, am gonna admit patty jenkins did something impressive (if oblique) with a protagonist we didn't particular like.

i believe in love, and i will prove the depth o' my conviction... by disintegrating you?

ww is iconic. am understanding why, given the expectations people had for ww, jenkins didn't wanna humanize what were less a character and more a symbol. ww, as a character, is kinda meh in the movie, but chris pine (an actor we don't particular like btw) was unexpected good. is a ww movie, but is pine's character who grows and is pine's character who gets the heroic sacrifice scene. nevertheless, at no time does pine upstage or diminish ww. patty jenkins and chris pine did a fantastic job with kinda crap material, and while  pine ain't the protagonist o' the movie, his is the character which advances the story if not the plot. 

can't even imagine how risky it were to make pine the emotional driver o' a ww film, of the ww film. never have pine's performance detract from ww were improbable to say the least. 

'course the problem for jenkins is now she is stuck with ww as a symbol as 'posed to a character. 

rey, unlike ww, weren't iconic. didn't even have the comic book baggage o' carol danvers who kinda started as damsel in distress (her powers were functional the result o' proximity to the original captain marvel... grafted onto her along with a portion o' his personality) and evolved in weird and even disturbing ways.  rey were a clean slate and writers/directors/actors (actress) coulda' done whatever they wanted. 

bears repeating, but there has been more than a couple ubermensch male protagonists, so is hardly shocking when a female version appears in 201_. ww handled lack o' character development in the protagonist by creating a surrogate, and challenged seeming unaware audiences by making the surrogate male. again, kudos to jenkins and pine. star wars is doing something similar, albeit a bit less seamless, by using adam driver for same function.  and captain marvel? the captain marvel folks didn't bother with the surrogate and was successful even so. regardless, am hopeful is not a trend. women protagonists in these big budget movies deserve to get meaningful parts which has 'em develop as characters and persons. can be a role model and can be aspirational while at the same time having their growth advance story. growth should advance story.

HA! Good Fun!

[ktchong]

So, this week a new movie came out.  I have never even heard of "Hustlers" or seen a trailer before, and the studio did not even release  a trailer until a month ago.   Then, I saw it got 90% at Rotten Tomatoes with 100+ critic reviews.  Since I have a movie club membership and can see movies for free, I  went into a theater to see Hustlers, not knowing what to expect. 

It turned out to be unexpectedly and surprisingly good.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 13, 2019 by ktchong

[Lexx]

Huh haven't seen / heard of Jennifer Lopez in ages.

 

Just watched latest Spiderman. Pretty good, imo. As I understood it, there will be one more movie but then all bets are off? Kinda sucks, as I find the Tom Holland Spiderman movies to be much better than that other Marvel stuff.

[Blarghagh]

It Chapter 2. It was kind of terrible, and not scary at all, and it was a complete mess, and it was the best time I've had at the movies because it was consistently entertaining if not always for the reasons it should be. It's the horror equivelant of a bad action movie. Laughed my head off.

[ShadySands]

^Sounds pretty close to the RLM review I saw. 

No desire to see the movie but was interested in how it turned out.

[Blarghagh]

For a much more interesting horror experience with a spooky clown (among other things), check out the recently released "Haunt" - does exactly what it sets out to do, which is make you clench your butt cheeks.

[Bartimaeus]

On 9/14/2019 at 11:25 AM, TrueNeutral said:

It Chapter 2. It was kind of terrible, and not scary at all, and it was a complete mess, and it was the best time I've had at the movies because it was consistently entertaining if not always for the reasons it should be. It's the horror equivelant of a bad action movie. Laughed my head off.

I just watched It (2017) the other day and also thought it was a literally laughable mess that wasn't scary at all. Don't understand how it got the ratings it did, but everything I've heard about the second is that it's the same but worse.

[Blarghagh]

Pretty much. I enjoy the crazy visuals and the characters and Bill Skarsgard's performance, but they're more like over the top action movies with horror imagery. I really liked both, but not because they're good. They're fantastic popcorn munchers for me to laugh at.

[Gromnir]

On 9/13/2019 at 6:13 AM, ktchong said:

So, this week a new movie came out.  I have never even heard of "Hustlers" or seen a trailer before, and the studio did not even release  a trailer until a month ago.   Then, I saw it got 90% at Rotten Tomatoes with 100+ critic reviews.  Since I have a movie club membership and can see movies for free, I  went into a theater to see Hustlers, not knowing what to expect. 

It turned out to be unexpectedly and surprisingly good.

vid

have a hard time watching movies which makes stripping = empowerment, or anything remote similar.

one o' our client bases were strippers and owners o' strip clubs. stripping often creates First Amendment issues. is common for a local community to ban, censor and/or confine stripping.

"Relative to the general population, women in the sex industry experience higher rates of substance abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, domestic violence, depression, violent assault, rape and posttraumatic stress disorder."

a majority o' strippers were sexually abused as children.

...

let that sink in for a moment. low-end o' study results show 66% o' strippers were sexual abused as children and a few such studies claim numbers approaching 90%. 

yeah, stripping is less 'bout sex and more 'bout control, but is a self-delusion and the stripper rare ends empowered as 'posed to horribly broken. 

get folks into theatre seats to see a story o' strong women while simultaneous selling more traditional t&a?

we can't do it.  were our job to defend first amendment rights and we faced more than a few crisis o' conscience in doing so.  didn't like advocating for white supremacists. didn't feel good 'bout representing "cultists" and gang leaders. representing strippers and strip club owners is what made us feel dirty, and not 'cause were sex trade.

am proud o' what we did as an attorney, in spite o' moments o' conflict. however, stripper cases is the one identifiable group o' clients am still conflicted 'bout. we never helped strippers. our success in representing strippers meant more women were exposed to the evils we quoted earlier: substance abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, domestic violence, depression, violent assault, rape and posttraumatic stress disorder. we were the bad guy. 

haven't watched clip and perhaps am complete missing what hustlers is 'bout, but am admitted a bit sickened when stripping gets repackaged as a source o' woman's empowerment. forcible reminds us o' our own complicity in helping perpetuate the myth.

 

Edited September 16, 2019 by Gromnir

[Raithe]

For that slight callback...

 

FIlmSchoolRejects - Rutger Hauer, Blind Fury

[LadyCrimson]

Mortal Engines -- y'know, the first 1/4 of the movie wasn't half bad. Nice/interesting visuals, seemed like it might have some interesting lore re: those cities on wheels etc. But it then became so hugely and obviously derivative of 1000 other movies (including "Star Wars", especially its end-game or any dogfight scene SW was in turn inspired by) that I FFWD'd through most of the supposedly exciting climactic battle,  bored out of my mind by then. And that undead cyborg chr. could have been excised completely in favor of better/more plot details or more focus on that non-mobile city behind the shield wall - like, were we supposed to care about them with zero focus on them? Ah well, visually it was still sometimes fun.

I remember Jihae (the female rebel leader chr) from that Nat. Geo. Mars series I watched a few episodes of. She has screen charisma, it'd be cool to see her in a larger and more useful film role.

[Raithe]

Anna.

Doesn't have the usual Luc Besson over the top visuals, so that's a bit of a surprise. However, it does have a whoole lot of matroshka doll storytelling via flashbacks to show you how the motivation and story you think you're seeing is actually something else. As that whole espionage with a semi-willing female operative looking for freedom, does have a element of Nikita-vibe and callback to it.

Basically the story of a girl turned into a KGB operative, and being caught up in the powerplays between the KGB and CIA in the late 80's and early 90's. Works nicely, if you can enjoy that sort of "5 years earlier", "6 months earlier", "1 year later" sort of back and forth. With a definite strong supporting cast of Helen Mirren, Luke Evans, Cillian Murphy,

However, there is the slight glitch of some anachronisms that might throw you out - general technology; laptops, mobile phones, and basically usb drives, being used in Moscow in that time period...

But ah well. Sit back , ignore the plot holes and oddities, and enjoy some spy silliness.

[ManifestedISO]

for Batman Day, 2019, still the greatest incarnation since Mask of the Phantasm ... The Dark Knight Rises

 

nice outfit ... do those heels make it hard to walk ...

I DON'T KNOW DO THEY

[Achilles]

They gave Gravity (2013) seven Oscars, so Ad Astra will get at least that many

[algroth]

9 hours ago, Achilles said:

They gave Gravity (2013) seven Oscars, so Ad Astra will get at least that many

I doubt it, but considering the awards were technical and, I'll add, entirely justified, and Ad Astra does match on a number of areas quite well, I do expect and hope it'll be getting some attention in this regard too.

 

That said, let's talk Ad Astra... The best way the film can be described as is Apocalypse Now meets Interstellar, and despite that rather interesting premise and plenty of excellent individual sequences that recall both films' best qualities, the result is a bit uneven and perhaps somewhat disappointing if nevertheless enjoyable on a whole. The other film it recalls on my end is the theatrical cut of Blade Runner, and in a way suffers essentially the same problems, mainly the voiceover and the somewhat incongruent shift to a positive outcome in an otherwise rather satisfyingly bleak experience. It feels to me that this Heart of Darkness narrative is strongly dependent on the ultimate destination as much as the journey itself, and what it ultimately reveals of the human condition and so on so forth - but the issue with this film is that a ridiculous episode with a stranded ship aside this is clearly the flimsiest and least interesting moment in the entire film. It sort of undoes a lot of the excellent tonal work leading to that point and ultimately trivializes the journey through a fortune-cookie message that could basically be boiled down to "no man is an island and all we have is each other". The voiceover itself does a lot to enforce this and remove subtlety and ambiguity in the themes/discourse. I also feel that no part suffers this issue more than Brad Pitt's wonderfully subtle and restrained performance: channelling a Tony Leung cold, level-headed, emotionally enclosed coolness, a lot can be inferred through the infinitesimal shifts in expression and body pose, in the nervous twitching of an eyelid or the tensing of his jaw (he really does have the most expressive jaw in Hollywood, at that). His performance helps convey a character who is dependant on his despondence and yet is always on the edge of becoming emotionally attatched... Or it would at least, if the voiceover weren't constantly outlining what the character thinks and feels at every turn. Like Blade Runner I'd love to see a version of this film without the voice-over, merely letting the performance speak for itself instead.

This aside, the film is an audiovisual wonder regardless, and Hoyte van Hoytema continues to establish himself as the finest cinematographer in the business. The sequences in Mars and beyond are especially eye-popping, and the use of textured lighting and back projections recalls also the very oneiric effect filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky or Polish new wavers like Wojciech Has or Krzysztof Kieslowski would generate with their use of the same techniques (think the opening sequence with the bird projections in The Hour-Glass Sanatorium or the use of water to give texture to lighting in several Tarkovsky films for example). As an experience parts of this are an absolute wonder to behold, aided by Max Richter's excellent score. It's a shame that the film as a whole doesn't quite have the meat to match the experience.

Edited September 22, 2019 by algroth

[Guard Dog]

Watched a movie called Black 47 last night. Sort of like an Irish Rambo except the plot mostly made sense.

[algroth]

Adam Sandler seems to have taken the pointers Al Pacino gave him in the set of Jack and Jill to heart.

[Gfted1]

Original Jurassic Park cast to return in next film.

[Raithe]

Sony and Marvel strike new deal to keep Spider-Man in the MCU

[InsaneCommander]

On 9/27/2019 at 12:37 PM, Raithe said:

Sony and Marvel strike new deal to keep Spider-Man in the MCU

How long until they announced he is out for... the third (?) time.

[algroth]

 

[Guard Dog]

Apparently one of the characters in the new Dune movie is getting gender and race swapped. Based on the level of outcry on another forum I thought it was going to be Jessica or Paul. Turns out it was Dr. Kynes. What is the big deal? That guy was on about 10 pages and that was it. Of course once the SJW camel gets it's nose under the tent other BS changes start happening.  Maybe there is still time for Jessica to become Jessie, Leto's black gay concubine. LOL, that STILL would not be worse than that POS version they made in the 80's with Patrick Stewart in it! 

[Malcador]

2 hours ago, Guard Dog said:

Apparently one of the characters in the new Dune movie is getting gender and race swapped. Based on the level of outcry on another forum I thought it was going to be Jessica or Paul. Turns out it was Dr. Kynes. What is the big deal? That guy was on about 10 pages and that was it. Of course once the SJW camel gets it's nose under the tent other BS changes start happening.  Maybe there is still time for Jessica to become Jessie, Leto's black gay concubine. LOL, that STILL would not be worse than that POS version they made in the 80's with Patrick Stewart in it! 

Hey now, the 80s movie has a moment that cannot be topped