2021

[Derived Absurdity]

Gonna do something different here. Instead of seeing a bunch of random movies for the first time, I'm gonna go down the list of my personal favorites in alphabetical order and rewatch them all, and say what I think. Some of them I haven't seen for a decade, so my opinion on them might change.

12 Angry Men - Yeah, I still really like this. It's interesting (to me) that I've always been far, far more compelled by character-based stories than plot-based ones, since I hate and am bored by people in real life. I guess I like people as long as they're fictional and safely behind a screen or in a book, away from me. But it's cool how watching a group of twelve sweaty old guys bickering around a table about stupid bullshit like angles of knives and so on can be be so compelling to me, even after I watch it over and over and over again. This movie could easily have been an hour longer IMO and I still would have remained fascinated.

I don't know how realistic this movie is on a technical level, but it didn't strike me as realistic on a psychological level, despite what I just said. It's implausible that every single one of these guys except one would have had their minds made up one way at the beginning and then change them after listening to some extremely simple and basic-ass objections for only an hour that, even if the defendant's lawyer somehow didn't bring them up, should have been considered by them beforehand anyway. I mean, some of these objections Juror #8 brings up are thuddingly obvious. I realize prejudice and peer pressure are powerful, but still, I think Juror #9 (the old guy), at least, should have voted not guilty at the beginning, given what we find out about his character later. I also get the feeling that, if this were a real jury, everyone would have stopped listening to Juror #8 the second he demonstrated he broke the law by bringing out his own knife, which would have been all the excuse they needed to stop paying attention to him.

Juror #8's decision early on to propose that everyone in the room anonymously make a verdict via paper ballots, and if no one changed their mind from guilty to not guilty he would stop arguing, struck me as an extremely risky and stupid gamble. There was no reason to think anyone in that room would have changed their minds at that point, he had barely even made any arguments yet, and if they didn't (which was probable), his decision would have sent someone he thought may have been innocent to death. (Also his gamble just caused every juror after him to be unceremoniously skipped in giving their arguments, which was funny.) I feel like he should have waited on that.

Most every character here was psychologically well-drawn with the weird exception of two, Juror #1 (the foreman) and #12 (the marketing agent). They had about as many speaking lines as everyone else, yet it's hard to know what they were thinking most of the time. #1 just seemed vaguely pissed off all the time and generally unmoved by the proceedings, and when he changed his vote we don't know why. #12 was a bit more of an open book, but everyone's behavior concerning him was strange, and he sometimes went off on weird tangential monologues that didn't add anything to the movie.

Rax said he didn't think this movie was cinematic. I'm still not sure what that means, but imo, a lot of the reason this movie is so gripping is because of the shot composition and the staging. There was very little boring shot/countershot editing here; the constant re-focusing, trading off of focus, dynamic and complicated blocking, lensing (used near the end to make thing seem more claustrophobic and emotionally intense), using camera angles to signify characters' emotional states and changing power dynamics, close-ups to signify moments of primary importance, and so on kept everything moving far more fluidly and engagingly than they otherwise would have been.

It's a great movie. The stockbroker was my favorite character. If I had to change one thing, I would have had the stockbrocker be the one to talk to Juror #8 at the end of the movie instead of that annoying old guy the movie was trying way too hard to get me to like.

[Gendo]

I tried to do the alphabetical order thing a long time ago when wanting to work my way through my DVD collection to make sure I saw everything I owned. The problem is I kept running into things where the next movie on the list was the type of thing that I couldn't just sit down and watch at any time, either because it was too long, or required being in a particular mood to watch, or whatever.

Anyway, I remember liking 12 Angry Men a lot; but I've only seen it once and it was a while ago.

[Derived Absurdity]

It has some mild hiccups but I think it's pretty great. I've watched it multiple times and it has no diminishing returns for me. I think it's one of the few films that remains just as compelling to people sixty years on as it did when it first came out. It's probably gonna remain just as good sixty years from now.

1408 - This movie is silly and bad. I remember thinking this movie is mostly good because, despite the last two-thirds of it being bad, the first third did such a good job of being unsettling and setting up a feeling of dread (even if the rest of the movie squandered it), but it doesn't even really do that particularly well. John Cusack's compelling performance covers over how corny and over-the-top and hack-and-slash even the supposedly superior and more atmospheric and subtle first third of the movie is. There was no reason for it to be so, either. The Stephen King short story it's based on is possibly his most effective one IMO (one of the few things he's written that has actually legitimately *scared* me, along with Pet Sematary and possibly a few passages in It and Desperation), and it's effective precisely because it's subtle and understated and psychological. As one quick example, the story mentions a maid who entered the room for a few minutes and became blind, but that during her episode she could see "the most awful colors", which is effectively creepy, but the movie changes this to her going blind and stabbing her eyes out while laughing hysterically, which is more conventional and hokey, and feels like it's trying too hard.

Most of the most effective parts of the shorty story were excised, and almost all of what it added was stupid. The beginning moments of his stay in the room, before the room's sense of menace dissipated entirely and it turned into a silly house-of-horrors carnival ride, were by far the best, yet even those could have been significantly better. And you can almost feel yourself deflating the moment the bathroom turned into a freezer, as you realize it's all just gonna be a bunch of empty haunted house attractions thrown at us one at a time from here on out.

It's not good that, even given all this, this is probably one of the better PG-13 horror movies out there and is easily one of the better Stephen King adaptations out there.

[Gendo]

I disliked 1408 the first time I saw it due to it not matching my expectations of the type of movie it was. I thought it was going to be a standard horror film, when it turned out to be more of a psychological thriller. Once I knew that, I enjoyed it upon a second viewing.

[Derived Absurdity]

Yeah my problem was that it much more of a standard horror movie than the surreal psychological horror the story was and it what it seemed like it was going to be at first.

28 Days Later - This movie is alright. It's not anything really special; I don't know why I have it as one of my favorite movies. I think I liked it so much because Naomie Harris is hot in it. The last third or so of the movie is quite bad. It turned the movie into a ham-fisted moral allegory (its sudden sharp swerve into "It turns out that the REAL monsters... are us" didacticism was almost jarring) and changed its whole tone for the worse. The majority of the movie was shot in a harsh, gritty, docu-realist style, and the last third switched it to some corny Gothic neo-Victorian melodrama, where the characters are running around in what basically amounts to a haunted mansion (it's an Army barracks, but it's basically a haunted mansion) where the indoor lighting is dark and with lighting literally flashing through the windows and thunder exploding, and with the two female characters running around dressed in extremely bright and vivid gowns or dresses or whatever that starkly counterpose the dark oppressive gloom, adding to that haunted old-timey feel. I don't know, I thought it was dumb.

The plot beats also turned nonsensical. Cillian Murphy extremely implausibly escapes being shot in the woods, and then he somehow climbs over the wall, lures some bad guys out, kills one like a ninja, somehow sneaks back in despite the fact that we just learned the outer perimeter of the barracks is covered in mines, and as part of his plan he releases the zombie they have locked up in the yard and sets it loose inside to kill everyone, despite the fact that the two people he's trying to rescue are also inside and they are the only ones that aren't armed. Great plan. He just watches through the windows like a serial killer as the zombie wastes everyone inside, and he didn't even know where the two captives were being held. Also, what kind of choice is it to have Selena a tough and resilient hardass survivor for the entire movie only to turn her into a docile damsel in distress waiting to be rescued at the end? She does absolutely *nothing* at the end except drug Hannah. She gets no assertive or agentic moments at all in terms of survival from the moment they arrive at the barracks; it's all the white man's show from here on out. That was stupid.

These are some extremely big problems. I don't think this movie is that great.

[Gendo]

I have such a weird view of Danny Boyle. I tend to dislike his style in general; I remember not liking 28 Days Later that much, and I never saw any of his earlier films (Trainspotting, The Beach). I also didn't like Sunshine that much, but I have a feeling I will upon a rewatch. But often I'm able to simultaneously like his movies while disliking his style; as is the case with 127 Hours, Slumdog Millionaire, and Yesterday (one of my favorite watches from last year). Also I liked Steve Jobs, and don't remember thinking that it felt like a Danny Boyle style movie the way his other stuff does.

[Derived Absurdity]

28 Days Later is the only Boyle movie I've ever seen.

The Apartment - I like this movie quite a bit. Its screenplay is clever and entertaining and thoughtful. Jack Lemmon playing Baxter is the personification of its continuous morphing between goofy farce and melancholic sadness so that they basically become one and the same. I thought his mugging for the camera was weird and annoying the first time I watched it, but I guess I got used to it. This movie is a pretty biting satire of the corporate world and wage slavery, made at a time when seeing such things on the big screen was probably not very common. It's sort of refreshing to see a movie where the character's work is as big a part of their life as ours is. Most of this movie takes place at work. And work is as oppressive and constraining on our two main characters here as it is for us, and they have to coordinate almost every single thing in their lives around it, like we do. Hollywood usually likes to pretend that "work" doesn't exist, and if it does exist it's not very important. It's sort of telling that on the rare occasions when work does take up a fair amount of screentime in a Hollywood movie, it's portrayed as boring and heartless and oppressive and something to be liberated from. Sort of similar to how movie high school students almost never actually take any classes and spend their entire day in the hallways and the cafeteria. I get that school and work are boring, but there's something to be said about reflecting real life on the screen. And as this movie shows, portraying work doesn't have to be boring if you do it right (mainly, by portraying it as evil and stupid).

Their work environment, just like Marx predicted*, also shapes how the two leads view each other. They don't really view each other romantically until the very end; their work structure and relationship blinds them to each other, or at least large parts of the other, preventing them seeing how they would, perhaps, "naturally" view each other without artificial constraints. It also corrodes their general worldviews; they're both cynical and jaded wage slaves, not flighty lovebirds (even though their shitty situations are kind of partly self-inflicted), which might be a contributing factor to why they don't immediately fall into each other's arms like you might expect. But it's better they don't anyway; when they do it's more meaningful.

Both of the leads, even though they were played well and presented with empathy, sucked as people until the very end. Kubelik's main flaw is that she was a melodramatic teenager who (by her admission) bounced between shitty manipulative men all her life and actually tried to kill herself when she realized her current shitty manipulative man didn't actually love her. And Bud shamelessly shot up the corporate ladder because he allowed himself to be complicit in a bunch of powerful sleazeballs' extramarital affairs, at the expense of his fellow co-workers, the sleazeballs' poor wives, and the sleazeballs' eternal souls. They were both driven to this by their mutual self-loathing, and its great how the movie represents their final attempt at gaining some self-respect and redemption as a flat-out wholesale rejection of the corporate culture they've been slaving for their whole lives. It portrays the corporate world and its shitty dehumanizing value system as antithetical to authentic and sincere and basic human connection, as something getting in the way of what most people consider to be the best - and maybe only - reason to live. For that reason alone this movie is pretty great, but it's great for a lot of other reasons too.

*This is a joke. Sort of.

[Derived Absurdity]

The Bad News Bears (1976) - Is this movie considered an American classic? I can't tell. It seems surprisingly unknown and unloved by general culture today. I grew up thinking The Bad News Bears was one of those movies everyone has heard of and knows at least by reputation, yet some quick research suggests that this movie is kind of forgotten. Nevertheless, regardless of what our culture thinks, I like it. It's very raw and grimy and distinctly unwholesome for a sports movie about some underdog kids, and it's not just because that one kid randomly yells a bunch of racial slurs several times, or because Coach Buttermaker gives a bunch of eleven-year-olds beer in the dugout. There are no kitschy or sentimental moments in this movie at all; the one moment that's genuinely emotional is brutal and harsh and stomach-churning. You think the movie starts out one way, but then it switches to something else entirely. It starts out as a classic underdog sports story, where a bunch of cartoonishly inept players led by a hilariously incompetent coach slowly manage to rise through the ranks with nothing more than grit and a can-do spirit and finally manage to nab the trophy from the top dogs at the very end. The lesson they learn is that you can do anything you set your mind to if you work hard and you believe in yourself. That's what you think this movie is for a while, only with racial slurs, but then it switches to become a harsh meditation on how debilitating overzealous cutthroat competition can be to the human spirit and how poisonous and unhealthy it is. Coach Buttermaker, who started off as an indifferent slapstick drunk, later (somewhat jarringly) turns into a hardass drill sergeant who cares only about winning, and his redemption comes from him basically sabotaging the last game and losing it on purpose after realizing that winning wasn't important. The team doesn't even get better through practice and determination as the movie goes on - most of them are as cartoonishly bad as they were at the beginning; the only reason the Bears start winning is that Buttermaker adds on two new players that kick everyone else's asses, and they hilariously joined the team entirely for selfish reasons. And at the end, they don't even win. They lose against the antagonists, but it doesn't matter because they all had fun and found their self-worth or something. This movie is like an anti-sports movie, or at least a deconstruction of the sports movie.

I think it's a shame this movie isn't better remembered. The more I think about it, the more I like it. It's funny, it's raw, it's mean, it's grounded and unvarnished, it's charming but not cloying, it's sweet but not sentimental, it's transgressive and unpredictable, and it has solid performances with a good message. I guess the kid repeatedly screaming out racial slurs and Buttermaker handing out alcohol to a bunch of children has contributed a bit to its not getting a lot of airtime on basic cable nowadays. Like, I think a lot of people would have raised their eyebrows at this stuff even back when it was made.

One major thing I don't get: the villain coach striking his son in the middle of the field is presented as this shocking moral event horizon, and is sort of the dramatic climax of the movie, but it's not like he didn't have a good reason. His son almost killed another kid because he was mad at him. I don't support violence against kids, but if there was any exception to that rule, that's it. If he hit him because he thought he wasn't doing well or that he was embarrassing him, that would make more sense and would fit more. But as it was that moment was just a dramatic thud. A weirdly discordant note in a movie that's otherwise pretty tight.

[Derived Absurdity]

Batman Begins - This movie is a lot sillier than most people remember. It has a secret centuries-long ninja organization that was responsible for The Black Death and the fall of Rome, visions of fire-breathing demon horses with red glowy eyes, a deranged psychopharmacologist with high-level mob connections that kidnaps a bunch of civilians and throws them in his gothic supervillain lair/insane asylum after turning them nuts via a nerve gas, a guy escaping from said deranged psychopharmacologist's evil lair by summoning a giant swarm of bats from a faraway underground cave to distract the cops via a sonar located on his shoe, a supervillain plot to magically vaporize all the water in a major metropolis via a stolen weapons-grade microwave emitter in order to activate the "weaponized hallucinogen" that was dumped into it so that all its citizens would go crazy, and of course a billionaire fighting crime by dressing up as a scary rodent at night and beating up a bunch of mob goons and driving over rooftops in a turbo-charged armor-plated bridging vehicle instead of, like, helping underfunded schools or something. This movie is significantly wackier than most comic book movies, yet it's so self-consciously dark and brooding and serious that I guess people never realized. This movie - and the rest of the trilogy - is deeply, deeply insecure about being a comic book movie. It tries so incredibly hard to be taken seriously and non-comic book-ey, and it mostly succeeds until the third act, where it just kind of gives up and surrenders to all the goofiness.

I maintain that the first two acts are still mostly pretty good, even though they're chock full of hilariously stupid shit hidden under a thick sheen of self-seriousness (Bruce Wayne doesn't want to execute a prisoner, so to get out of the situation he just explodes the place the prisoner is trapped in, ensuring his death along with about forty other people). They're surprisingly emotional and moving. Nolan has a reputation for not being a particularly emotive filmmaker and not caring much about his characters, yet that's belied here; there's a lot of character-based drama, drawn-out and intimate close-ups of faces, melancholy and poignancy, and so on. This movie shows that Nolan can be emotive if he wants to, he just chooses not to be. It's also surprisingly funny; the line "tell them that joke you know" is genuinely hilarious. The first two acts' dialogue in general is generally excellent even when thudding and heavy-handed, all the villains manage to be scary and effective even though there's four of them, it's well-paced, it's exceedingly moody and atmospheric, there are some authentically fantastic scenes like when Bruce is dressed down by Falcone in the restaurant or when Ra's Al Ghul reveals himself in the mansion, and so on. It's all really good. Great, even. Then the third act comes and it all just goes to shit. I don't know what happened, but it just turns into an anticlimactic jumble of goofy slapstick nonsense, implausible scenarios and inorganic plot beats, dramatic inertia, horrifically edited fight scenes that are basically just meaningless blurs (this was a problem throughout, to be fair), awful child acting, and amateurish expository dialogue shoved into the mouths of distracting pointless randos. It's awful and grotesquely stupid, especially when it all takes place under the umbrella of - and I feel I must repeat this - a ninja attempting to destroy a city by evaporating its water supply via a weapons-grade microwave emitter, thus activating the "weaponized hallucinogen" his fellow ninjas have been pumping into it and thereby turning the metropolis' citizenry into a bunch of murderous psychotics. I don't know, shouldn't they just try the plague rats thing again? Because I feel like there are easier ways to destroy a city.

The city itself is one of the best things about the movie. It's a stylized and nightmarish dystopia with a giant squealing monorail and a slum of absolute architectural and expressionistic insanity called "The Narrows". It's a shame that it was turned into generic Chicago in the sequel, one of the many reasons the sequel is inferior.

Another thing about the last act is the absolutely awful callback lines. I feel like fully half the dialogue of the last act is just callbacks to something someone said earlier in the movie, and it was awkward and inauthentic every single time.

I feel like I should mention the "intensified continuity" thing that people smarter than me about movies keep saying is a big thing about Nolan. I feel like this refers to Nolan's style of using about eighteen extremely fast cuts to show something when most other directors would use about one or two, and his habit of speeding up the momentum of a scene by cutting out all the extraneous seconds that most other directors would keep in (instead of showing a character walking up to a door and opening it to enter a room or whatever, Nolan just time warps his character several seconds into the future, skipping showing the walking and door opening, to keep his picture moving). This makes it seem like things in Nolan's movies are happening a lot faster than they "actually" are, and that we the audience are being continuously overwhelmed with information. This is effective if there's a solid emotional covering around all of it, like there is in the first two acts of this movie; it makes things seem far more intense and dramatic and fast-paced than they otherwise would be. This is a style that Nolan usually uses well, and is, I think, the primary reason why so many people get so overwhelmed the first time they watch one of his movies, and why so many have such dramatic diminishing returns when re-watched. With this movie, it really helps cover over all the stupid shit in it; you only notice or care about all the stupid shit on repeat viewings. The non-chronological structure in the beginning of the movie helps as well in keeping audience interest, even though it's done sort of confusingly; there are multiple stories going on at once, so you have to pay attention. It's pretty good. Unfortunately there is no second story going on in the movie's climax.

The movie has good aspects, but has too many gigantic flaws for it remain a favorite.

[Derived Absurdity]

Bridge to Terabithia (2007) (SPOILERS) - I read someone describe this as "baby's first Pan's Labyrinth". I guess that's fair, although this movie is a lot more viscerally sad. This movie destroyed me when I first watched it when I was fourteen or whatever. I was a complete mess, and I'm not ashamed to say it. This movie made a mess out of a lot of people. Its twist is easily one of the most shocking and emotionally intense I've seen.

The biggest reason the twist is so wrenching is AnnaSophia Robb's performance. She doesn't even seem like a real person in this movie. Her character is like someone's Platonic ideal of a little girl doll, but somehow rendered in flesh-and-blood form. She's like the generic idealized representation of a spunky little girl, the ne plus ultra of that concept. She doesn't even seem possible within our reality, like her character came down from a higher plane where people exist more as the abstract representations of certain categories they belong to. It's hard for me to explain, at least without sounding mildly disturbing. Robb was my age when I first watched this, and I had a serious crush on her character, but it was sort of muted, because even back then she felt and looked like someone's idea than a person. I guess this means her performance was good.

But with an adult's eyes, her character seems more artificial and computer-generated than the actual CGI here. Her character is basically laboratory-engineered to be as lovable and adorable as possible so that it hurts as much as possible when she randomly and brutally drowns. No wonder her death hurt so much. In fact her character was a proto-Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a rare example of one as a child. Our male protagonist is depressed and lonely. She drops out of the sky one day and shows up in his life out of nowhere, she for some completely inexplicable reason is irresistibly attracted to him and has zero interest in making other friends, and she works to make him feel better with her charming adorable spunkiness. And like a lot of Manic Pixie Dream Girls, she dies tragically to allow room for his growth. She checks all the traditional boxes with the exception of exuding casual and non-judgmental sexuality, which makes sense since she's eleven or something. She's a Manic Pixie Dream Girl in training. Her death was effective (I cried again), but it was obviously coldly manipulated.

The death and everything after it was handled really well. Everything before it - which was like 80% of the movie - was mediocre. Their gritty and difficult real lives should have been more gritty and difficult, their magical dream world should have been more magical and dreamy. There should have been a sharper contrast. There was no hard or mature edge to this movie until the 180 degree turn at the end, which contributed to making it more shocking but lessened the movie's overall quality. This movie felt largely inauthentic in general, with the exception of the grief scenes, but those perfectly authentic and moving and well-done scenes had an inauthentic base. It's too bad. I kind of figured it wouldn't hold up, but I was hoping for otherwise.

[Faustus5]

Bridge to Terabithia (2007) - I read someone describe this as "baby's first Pan's Labyrinth". I guess that's fair, although this movie is a lot more viscerally sad. This movie destroyed me when I first watched it when I was fourteen or whatever. I was a complete mess, and I'm not ashamed to say it. This movie made a mess out of a lot of people. Its twist is easily one of the most shocking and emotionally intense I've seen.

Had this one in my Netflix queue, decided the read the book first, then it occurred to me that I didn't need to feel miserable again, deleted it. Still might check it out one day.

[Gendo]

Am I the only one that had to read Bridge to Terabithia in school; long before there was a movie version?

[Eva Yojimbo]

I'm enjoying this new formatting. It's nice that someone here (besides Rax occasionally) is doing more lengthy reviews. I used to save such things for my favorite films I rewatched as well, though mine usually ended up being 2k+ words! I had an idea years ago of going through my Favorite Films list (which is ancient by now) and rewatching/reviewing all of them. It's still something I might do eventually.

As for the films you've done so far, I loved 12 Angry Men back when I saw it, which is probably close to 17 years ago. I'll actually disagree with Rax a bit as well about it not being cinematic. At least I'd argue that it's probably as cinematic as a film full of talking heads can be. Lumet actually does a lot with modulating shot-types, staging, and very precise editing patterns. He really understands the power of cutting to close up and knows how to save it for just the right moments. I mean, it's not Hitchcock or anything, but it's really well crafted cinematically, far more than anything you'd see on any of the bazillion courtroom dramas out there today. There's just a general problem with these types of films that there's only so much you can do visually to make it more interesting than it already is on the page and with the performances. It actually reminds me a lot of porn in that sense. I honestly don't remember the various arguments or characters or how logical the case goes, but I remember the whole thing working really well dramatically and psychologically.

I also remember liking The Apartment back when I saw it, but that was before I was very familiar with Billy Wilder and I bet I'd appreciate it even more now. Speaking of liking the film as satire, Billy Wilder did satire probably better than any of the classic Hollywood directors. You should really check out his film Ace in the Hole, which is kinda like Nightcrawler before Nightcrawler in being a satire of the media, and it's just as dark in its own way and freakishly prescient of the modern news circus (the original title was actually "The Big Circus"). As for The Apartment, I undoubtedly saw it when I was too young to appreciate the satirical elements as much, which is another reason to give it a rewatch.

I hated The Bad News Bears as a kid solely because they lost in the end... I wonder what I'd think of the film now, since all I really remember are the kids being kinda foul-mouthed and how much the film used the Toreador song from Carmen, which was (unknowingly, I guess) my first introduction to the opera that I'd come to love years later and would ignite my passion for the medium in general.

I actually think the goofiness is what makes Batman Begins the best of Nolan's Batman films; that, and it's the only one of Nolan's films that has something of the expressionistic style that makes Batman work (at all) as a character. I think what you say about those films being insecure as superhero films is very true, and that's even more true in the later films where Nolan tries really hard to bring Batman into the real world and remove all of those expressionistic "non-realistic" style elements. Batman just doesn't work in that context, and it makes the whole thing seem as silly as the premise actually is. Batman requires stylization, it requires the underlying metaphor that these characters are representations of psychological states, even psychotic states. Like, Nolan TRIES to make Joker "represent chaos," but he does this in the most literal manner possible rather than just letting the character be a symbol for it as he was in The Animated Series or even Burton's Batman. Batman Begins still has some of those elements, and it's all the better for it.

You're basically right about what intensified continuity is, though you kinda blur it with other techniques like jump cuts, which I guess can work when combined with intensified continuity to add... errr, even more intensity. I mean, directors going back to at least Eisenstein in the 20s figured out that you could increase the pace of editing to increase drama, but it really got out of hand some time in the 90s/early-00s when many films started having average-shot-lengths of less than 2-3 seconds. David Bordwell is the major authority on this if you want to read/learn more about it. Nolan is by no means the only director doing it, but he's perhaps the most infamous if only because of his popularity.

Never saw Bridge to Terabithia, but you make me want to see it. I haven't seen 28 Days Later in a long time and don't remember much.

[Derived Absurdity]

I really have to apologize. I was fully intending to put a big fat SPOILER tag over my Bridge to Terabithia post, then I just forgot. I really hope I didn't spoil it for anyone. I think from now on a good assumption is that every post on this thread will be a spoiler.

Also, I wasn't even aware there was a Bridge to Terabithia book until recently. A few days ago I read some posts from people who were saying they had to read the book out loud in class when they were kids, and the twist would just shell shock everyone. Like, half the class would be crying when they got to it, including the teacher. And many of them would just walk around in a shocked depressive daze for the rest of the day. It was pretty great. I remember that's how I felt for weeks the first time I saw the movie.

I'm enjoying this new formatting. It's nice that someone here (besides Rax occasionally) is doing more lengthy reviews.

It's actually sometimes been a bit of a struggle to make them as short as they are. Sometimes I think I'm too in love with the sound of my own voice.

Speaking of liking the film as satire, Billy Wilder did satire probably better than any of the classic Hollywood directors. You should really check out his film Ace in the Hole, which is kinda like Nightcrawler before Nightcrawler in being a satire of the media

I've been wanting to see Some Like It Hot and Sunset Boulevard, I'll put Ace in the Hole on the list too. Although, as said, Nightcrawler is only barely a satire of the media.

Agreed with your thoughts on Batman Begins. I ultimately consider The Dark Knight trilogy an interesting experimental failure. I will always praise Nolan for at least having ambition and wanting to express some fairly deep ideas in his films, even if he doesn't express them well or do much with them.

Never saw Bridge to Terabithia, but you make me want to see it.

Yeah, well, unfortunately, I spoiled it for you. I think your enjoyment of it will be really diminished because of that, since the shock of that twist is the only thing anyone remembers from that movie for a good reason.

Next:

Bully (2001) - If you want a mix of conservative kids-these-days moralizing and extremely lewd and shameless exploitation, this is it. I don't know why you would, but it's here if you do. This is a pseudo-realist account of the murder of Bobby Kent by creepy old man Larry Clark, and it's still sort of good. Most of the performances are good, it manages to feel naturalistic, and it's engaging and effective enough. Much like his previous movie Kids, this movie wants to have the audience sit and gape in horrified shock for about an hour and a half at what is happening to our nation's youth. Most of the kids here are high most of the time. They don't have jobs and don't go to school. They have meaningless and random sex with each other all day. One character is a teenage prostitute. Another one is brainless and promiscuous who forces her parents to take care of her own baby. There are little kids in an arcade who swear a lot while playing some Mortal Combat-style violent video game. There's a scene where the some of the major protagonists are watching a music video by Eminem, who was still considered scary when this movie came out, and one of them impulsively yells out "Fuck the police!" Their music choices in general are just mindless and misogynistic gangsta rap songs. And so on. You know? The judgy boomer-esque moralizing here is not subtle.

And yet just as much as this movie wants us to be shocked by them, it wants us to be turned on by them. It's constantly shoved straight up their crotches when they get in cars or right at their asses when they walk across lawns or right over their tits when they lay across beds. To its credit, the movie manages to be gender egalitarian in its shameless lasciviousness - it focuses on both naked titty and guy chest with almost equal gratuitousness. Every single one of the "teenagers" the camera voyeuristically ogles here is extremely photogenic, to put it mildly, even the most fucked up ones, which is one hell of a fortuitous coincidence and is probably not, you know, 100% realistic. This movie is just gross. Which is too bad, because the performances are pretty good, the actual murder scene is pretty wrenching, and for the most part it's effective. It would be better and more moving if Larry Clark actually gave a shit about the inner thoughts of any of the characters instead of using them to moralize and exploit, but I guess that's not his way.

[Eva Yojimbo]

Never saw Bridge to Terabithia, but you make me want to see it.

Yeah, well, unfortunately, I spoiled it for you. I think your enjoyment of it will be really diminished because of that, since the shock of that twist is the only thing anyone remembers from that movie for a good reason.

Next:

Actually you didn't, because I stopped reading after your first paragraph, which is what made me want to see it! :)

[Derived Absurdity]

Lol. Okay.

Call Me By Your Name - Yeah, it's good. I appreciate it, I don't love it. I kind of feel like I already said most of what I can about it three years ago, and my thoughts haven't really changed:

It's lush, sensual, vibrant, and rich. Watching it is like transporting yourself into a nostalgic wistful idealized memory of an idyllic langorious summer you had as a kid, and the movie is made in a way that makes me think that's how it was meant to be taken. The movie is oriented more around emotionally formative experiences and meaningful moments than concrete story points, which is exactly how our memories are constructed. ... The entire movie takes place in a heightened reality, a place of dreams and memories. It's like it's all Elio's memories and dreams of one summer told from thirty years later.

Some people have said this movie is a love story, but it's not. It's an idealized representation of a crush/infatuation, but I guess the fact that people have confused it with love shows how well it pulled it off.

It's more accurately viewed as a coming-of-age story for Elio than a love story, really. It's primarily about his development, his letting go of his childhood and transitioning to adulthood by opening himself up to Oliver and surrendering his romantic and sexual inexperience. The first half or so of the movie is mostly about him trying to articulate his own desire for Oliver to himself and demand that it be taken seriously; it's a coming-of-age narrative with romance as the vehicle, which is why the movie spends so long with the two characters' merely circling each other instead of taking concrete steps to act on their mutual attraction. The romance isn't the primary point, Elio's psychological development is, which the romance helps him with.

The characterization is good enough. Elio is performatively aloof and cool, yet deep down he's hungry for everyone's approval and acceptance, and Oliver is outwardly brash and dickish but inwardly perceptive and tender. The two balance each other nicely, and it's fun watching them orbit each other and eventually close in. Unfortunately this movie doesn't do a lot for me on a personal level. I can appreciate it, I guess, but it's not very fun for me to watch. It's too long and slow and there's not enough going on to sustain my interest for the three hours or whatever this movie goes on for. It's funny to watch this movie right now, what with Armie Hammer's career in apparent freefall over him being a cannibal or whatever.

[Derived Absurdity]

Compliance - If Bridge to Terabithia was baby's first Pan's Labyrinth, this can be probably be called baby's first Girl Next Door. This caused a bit of a stir when it came out a few years ago, if you'll remember. It's a dramatic reenactment, basically, of an incident where some guy called a McDonald's pretending to be a cop and told the manager that one of her female employees was caught stealing from a customer. This somehow snowballed into the employee getting detained and strip searched by the manager in the back room and the manager's fiancé coming in to watch her for two hours, during which, following instructions from the phone, he made her do jumping jacks, touch herself, and give him oral, and he even spanked her for not cooperating, all of which was caught on surveillance footage. Then a maintenance man replaced the fiancé, was given the phone, and figured out the call was fraudulent after like thirty seconds. The fiancé was arrested for sexual assault, a suspect was arrested for the call, the manager was fired, and the employee underwent therapy and sued McDonald's for $200 million. One of the four points McDonald's based its defense on in the trial was that it was not responsible for what happened because the victim did not remove herself from the situation, and I quote, "contrary to common sense."

This movie is unbelievable, or it would be, if it didn't follow the real life incident it was based on almost exactly. In fact, it actually downplayed parts of it. People were big mad when it came out. They said they thought it was obscenely unrealistic. But it's not, at least where the major victim was concerned - she was a literal Girl Scout who loved Jesus and loved her 'mama and had never been in trouble with anyone in her life. She once stole a pencil from a teacher and felt guilty about it and gave it back, to give a picture of what she was like. She was raised to believe that you're supposed to follow the rules and obey authority, like we all are. And then some disembodied voice who said he was a cop was suddenly telling her she was in trouble with the law, and she felt physically trapped since the guy in the room with her was twice her size and she couldn't exactly call out or contact anyone or anything. Her behavior on the surveillance footage was understandable; the manager's is more debatable.

People make a big deal about what a good commentary this movie is on human nature, about our inclinations to mindlessly comply with authority figures and obey anyone around us who happens to have a commanding voice, especially in stressful and unfamiliar situations. The director certainly plays up that angle, saying that the film is supposed to interrogate the audience and make us ask disturbing question about ourselves - "We think we wouldn't comply with these ridiculous demands as we watch the movie, but if you were actually in this situation, how could you be so sure?" he asked. Cue incessant mentions of Milgram and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Yet I disagree that anything interesting about humanity can be gleaned from this incident. Yes, there have apparently been about seventy instances around the country where something like this happened, but only a small handful of those escalated to strip searches or sexual abuse, and none of those came anywhere near close to the severity of this particular one. And the guy had to call about ten stores for every one where a supervisor would take his bait. Not a high success rate. If you're wanting to showcase humanity's compliant nature, this is not the best example to use. I used to consider this one of my favorite movies precisely because I thought it was a deep and incisive commentary on human nature, but it's not, really.

If the director really did want us to ask disturbing questions about what we would do in that situation, I think it's a rather odd choice for him to reveal the caller's identity to us so early in the movie. Instead of taking the audience along with the characters and letting us go through what they're going through, by revealing to us that they're all getting pranked early on it purposely distances us from them. Now we're just invited to watch them and wonder at their gullibility and ask when they'll finally catch on to something that was revealed to us an hour ago. It invites us to feel superior to them and not question ourselves. It also kept switching back and forth between the restaurant and the caller's house for no reason like we were watching a spooky crime thriller. Not good. Keep it in the restaurant, don't distance ourselves from the characters by giving us information they don't have. This is not difficult. This movie sucks. Girl Next Door has basically the same ideas and themes, but it is 1000% deeper and smarter and more incisive.

[Derived Absurdity]

The Conjuring 2 - I know... I know. This is some generic-ass Hollywood spookhouse carnival bullshit. But it's very good generic-ass Hollywood spookhouse carnival bullshit. Like, if generic-ass Hollywood spookhouse carnival bullshit is what you're looking for, it doesn't get much better than this. I've seen this movie three times and I was perfectly on its wavelength every single time. It worked on me. This was some scary shit. It was scary in the theater and it was scary on my computer in my room at two a.m. with all the lights out. There were several scenes here that were just absolute top-notch horror shit, in my opinion. I don't know, this movie managed to scare me more than The Shining, Get Out, It, Midsommar, and all the artsy bullshit A24 keeps pumping out. You know, people always say, "Well, this horror movie isn't really scary, exactly... but it's still really good! It has an unnerving atmosphere!" Bullshit. When I watch a horror movie I want it to be actually fucking scary. If a horror movie isn't scary, it sucks. Period. I'm tired of being nice about this. Dancing goats and clowns with fucked up eyes and Swedish cults and metaphorical STD demons are not scary. Toy firetrucks rolling out of tents by themselves and invisible old men rocking in chairs, however, apparently, are. That's just how it is. A24 needs to take some directions from James Wan on how to make their shit actually scary.

Anyway, this movie is solid. I still need to be watching by myself in a pitch black room at two in the morning with headphones on for any horror movie to be actually effective on me, including this one, but if I let it, it works fine. It definitely levels off a bit by the second half, and the scares start getting a bit repetitive and lose their sting, but that's alright. Because the movie is good enough to drag you along as a movie, not just a meaningless collection of spooky scenes. The plot is emotionally compelling (even if it's based on bullshit) and the characters and performances are good enough that you give a shit about them. There were few clichés that would take you out of the story; in fact this movie subverts many of them. The fact that the Warrens are perfectly competent and experienced ghost hunters makes them refreshingly un-annoying as horror protagonists, yet the fact that they still take the demon seriously makes the demon remain threatening to us. The little girl who played Janet, the primary haunting victim, was excellent and gave a fairly powerful performance and was basically the soul of the movie. I admit the ending was sort of lame. There also weren't a whole lot of rules governing the supernatural stuff; things just kind of happened randomly, for the most part, but it's the mark of the movie's quality that I didn't really care while watching it and I don't really care now either. People also complain that it's long; yes, it is, but I never notice the length, even during the lull in the second half, because it's emotionally gripping. Another point in its favor.

I did not care at all for the first Conjuring, nor have I liked any other movie I've seen in the Conjuring Cinematic Universe. I'm not sure why this one worked so well when all the other ones didn't, but it did.

[Derived Absurdity]

Cube (1997) - On a basic level, this movie sucks. Terrible acting, bad writing, nonsensical story, and so on. But it works fine as an existentialist nightmare. When I was younger I thought the cube was basically a literalized metaphor for life - it was meaningless, purposeless, randomly dangerous, it just exists for no reason, it has no master plan or overarching purpose or ultimate explanation or endgame, we all find ourselves trapped in it against our will, and it consistently rebuffs all of our attempts to impose any meaning on it or make any sense of it whatsoever. The cube definitely has a lot of order, it seems to follow at least some internal rules, and it gives off the appearance of being constructed by some higher intelligence, sort of like the universe, but that's all on the surface, a façade it presents; beyond that, it's pure chaos, all that precise geometrical and mathematical order adding up to precisely nothing. It is not self-justifying, there is no reason for it to exist, there is no purpose or meaning beyond the order, and there is no reason for anyone or anything to exist in it. As Worth said, "It is a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan." Very nihilistic, very existential. I guess the cube could also work here as a commentary on bureaucracy or society or whatever, but I prefer the far deeper and darker interpretation. I naturally feel some degree of sympathy for any piece of art as existentialist/nihilist/absurdist as this, even if it sucks, which is why I think it's interesting and worth watching once, but definitely not a favorite.

[Derived Absurdity]

Dogtooth - This movie sucks. I don't know what Yorgos Lanthimos was attempting to do here and I don't care. I guess presenting the nuclear family as an evil brainwashing cult and parenting as totalitarianism or something? Thanks, I already knew that. Every Lanthimos movie I've seen has basically been social commentary that I might have thought deep and profound and subversive when I was a teenager (except for The Favorite, which wasn't about anything). All of them felt insanely dull and boring and stupid. I'm not spending any more time thinking about this.

[Gendo]

I love Cube, probably mostly because it's different. I enjoy the sequels too even though they are both much worse.

[Derived Absurdity]

It would fit right in with Kafka or Sartre. There needs to be more existentialist horror movies.

The Edge of Seventeen (2016) - I still think this movie is very good, but at least 60% of that is due to Hailee Steinfeld's performance. Most of the rest is due to Woody Harrelson. Everything else is mostly just okay. But Hailee Steinfeld gives one of my favorite performances ever here. I enjoy watching this more than any other teen movie I know of, even though certain others like Juno or Mean Girls or whatever might technically be "better". Probably because I sympathize/identify quite a lot with Nadine, and I see a lot of how I acted as a teenager in her - her general emotional intensity and erraticism, her social anxiety, her disconnect from her peers and the world in general, her self-loathing which she hides well through cutting remarks, and her neurotic narcissism and self-absorption. She manages to be extremely likeable in this movie despite her selfishness and immaturity, and partly because of them, 100% due to Hailee Steinfeld's enormous amounts of natural charisma and confident displays of vulnerability. Which makes me think of how subjective and meaningless a concept like "likeability" even is. Nadine is privileged and melodramatic and immature and self-absorbed, and plenty of people would be fine with refusing to see past any of that, and wonder how anyone could find her likeable at all. I wouldn't be able to give a good answer, except to say that I see a lot of myself in her and most of the time I can see exactly where she's coming from.

This movie also makes me appreciate how little being "realistic" actually matters in movies like this. Hailee Steinfeld is astonishingly beautiful, smart, funny, and charming here, and people mockingly wonder how her character could be so unpopular or lonely or unstable or only have one friend. Leaving aside the fact that merely being attractive or funny doesn't automatically guarantee a one-way ticket to social success, even in high school, conventional objective "realism" is quite a bit different from emotional realism. Teen movies operate in a heightened reality; they're melodramatic and histrionic and and seemingly little things get imbued with intense emotional significance on a level that seems out of proportion because that accurately reflects most teenagers' inner emotional worlds, which are chaotic hormonal hurricanes of intense emotion. Teenagers generally respond better to hyperbolic melodramatic movies with broad and heightened storylines and exaggerated and unrealistic characters because those are on their emotional wavelengths more than "realistic", naturalistic stories. I'm obviously not a teenager anymore, but Nadine still connected to me on a purely emotional level, even though she's obviously unrealistic, or at least implausible. And emotional reality is the level movies operate on anyway. Her character was not a realistic depiction of a lonely, anxiety-ridden, self-loathing teenager, but it was a realistic depiction of what being a lonely, anxiety-ridden, self-loathing teenager is like, and that's what matters. And as a bonus everyone who identifies with her gets to project themselves onto someone who is inhumanly beautiful and compelling and charismatic. What's not to like?

This is one of my comfort movies. It's objectively very high quality, but I mostly like it just because it makes me feel good. This movie awakens my latent gender fluidity, I think. I identify quite a lot with Nadine, and I think I have come to accept that it's not despite the fact that she acts extremely - or at least stereotypically - feminine, but because of it. I wasn't born in the wrong body or whatever - although I have seriously considered the possibility before - but I am fluid. I have a lot of feminine characteristics, I naturally act feminine a lot of the time, I have a lot of female-coded personality quirks, and most of the people I have connected to the hardest in real life and fiction have happened to be female. I don't know if I'm particularly special here, or if this is something most men experience but no one knows about it because we never talk about it to anyone. I don't know. I just know that Nadine's gender did not present a particularly big obstacle to me identifying with her, and in fact it probably helped. I imagine myself as the opposite sex occasionally, and Nadine is a somewhat heightened and idealized projection of what I think I would be like as female. I'm getting more personal here than I feel comfortable with, but I said I was going to give my honest reactions to movies, so I am.

[Eva Yojimbo]

Dogtooth - This movie sucks. I don't know what Yorgos Lanthimos was attempting to do here and I don't care. I guess presenting the nuclear family as an evil brainwashing cult and parenting as totalitarianism or something? Thanks, I already knew that. Every Lanthimos movie I've seen has basically been social commentary that I might have thought deep and profound and subversive when I was a teenager (except for The Favorite, which wasn't about anything). All of them felt insanely dull and boring and stupid. I'm not spending any more time thinking about this.

Basically agree here. I didn't like it either. I tend to have a problem with these quirky, "edgelord" movies that end up coming off as cringey to me. I've generally found such things are love-it-or-hate-it affairs, and I fall into the "hate" category with that one.

[Derived Absurdity]

Yeah it's cringey edgelord shit and I have no tolerance for that.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - I had placed this on my favorites list back when I was more insecure than I am now and when I let critical consensus determine my opinions on film for me. As I said in my last thread, that doesn't mean I don't think it's good - it's very good - but I'm not sure it's one of the best films ever made. It's extremely creative and imaginative and original and well-constructed, certainly, possibly even visionary. But it's not really deep or profound in any way (to me), or psychologically complex, or even emotionally moving. Obviously that last one is personal, but my primary reason for being unmoved is because every character in it sucks, especially Clementine, who was even more unsympathetic and grating the third time I watched it. God, she sucks. I know that's the point, but she sucks so much that I actively root for her unhappiness. How could you be so flighty and thoughtless and impulsive that you literally erase someone's memory from you because you think they're boring? Lol. It's funny that she's held up as an example of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She is the best subversion of that trope that I know of. She's genuinely unsympathetic, she has serious mental issues, her relationship with our main character Joel is doomed, and the only reason she did the traditional meet cute thing in the movie's beginning was because she vaguely remembered Joel. This is all even before that big speech at the end where she basically outright stated to Joel that she wasn't a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. People are stupid.

I guess my problem is that I disagree with the movie's main message. The idea that Joel and Clementine would get together again even after it was made pretty clear that they're incompatible and they make each other unhappy seems like a sad thing to me, not romantic or uplifting. Getting in a relationship with someone even though you have pretty good reason to think it's not going to work out just because you're currently infatuated with them seems like a bad idea, a silly one, and I think presenting that as romantic betrays a fairly immature and nihilistic view of romance. I know it's supposed to be the journey, not the destination, but there isn't a hard conceptual line between those two. The movie does bring up some interesting existential questions, mainly: if we had the choice to get rid of memories we don't like, would it be a good idea to do so? There's a purely abstract existential aspect to this question and a practical one. On the practical level, no, having a company like Lacuna exist in our world is obviously bad since it's creepy and invasive and potentially subject to abuse, as this movie shows. But on the purely existential level, if those problems were gone, would it still be bad? If negative memories could be simply and cleanly purged? This movie clearly thinks so, but it failed to convince me of it. I think it would be great.

It is also quite the coincidence that I just happened to watch this one on Valentine's Day, considering the bulk of this movie took place on Valentine's Day. I did not plan that.

[Derived Absurdity]

Forgetting Sarah Marshall - I saw this movie once a very long time ago and I liked it because I had a crush on Mila Kunis and thought she was particularly attractive here. That was it. And I was correct. She's radiant. Angelic. I barely paid any attention when she wasn't on screen.

Which is good, because holy god is this movie terrible. This is easily the worst movie on my list so far, and one of the worst mainstream movies I've seen, period. Schlubby man-baby Peter gets broken up with by his attractive, famous, and successful girlfriend Sarah Marshall, so he stalks her to Hawaii and follows her around creepily as she fucks around with her cool new boyfriend Russell Brand. Mila Kunis is a receptionist he meets who gives him a $6000 room for free just because she feels sorry for him because he looks so dejected. She's apparently available and inexplicably interested in Peter, despite the fact that she looks like Mila Kunis and works as a receptionist or concierge or whatever in a hotel in fucking Hawaii. She is the most ridiculous wish-fulfillment Manic Pixie Dream Girl I have ever seen in a movie here. She is so ridiculous that if I didn't know better I would think she was Peter's hallucination or something like in Joker. She's like that character Ruby Sparks played completely straight. I got second-hand embarrassment watching her, both for her and Jason Segel. And as for Sarah Marshall, well, at the end of the movie, she loses her job and all her social status, she gets revealed to be a long-time cheater, her new boyfriend Russell Brand humiliates her by telling her at a dinner with Peter and Mila Kunis that he has cheated on her countless times and plans on continuing to do so, and then Mila Kunis makes out with Peter right in front of her specifically to hurt her, and then later Mila Kunis shows what a cool girlfriend she is by trying to make Sarah Marshall jealous of Peter by having sex with Peter extremely loudly right next to her apartment, and then Russell Brand dumps Sarah Marshall, and a then-desperate Sarah Marshall tries to give Peter a blowjob but he rejects her because she hurt him too much, and he leaves her. And then Mila Kunis hears about the blowjob and breaks up with him, but then her male friend convinces her that Peter made a serious sacrifice because breaking off in the middle of a blowjob is the hardest thing a man could ever do, so she should take him back, and she does. And the one scene Mila Kunis and Sarah Marshall talk to each other by themselves, they spend half the conversation complimenting Peter, who isn't even there. LOL. Who the hell hurt Jason Segel so bad? What kind of bitter pathetic man-baby would write this?

Sarah Marshall didn't even do anything bad. I spent most of the movie genuinely wondering if I was supposed to dislike her or not, and if I was, why. She even had a whole emotional monologue near the end that explained why she broke up with Peter, that she was tired of mommying him, a genuinely heartfelt monologue that was so tonally and narratively out of place that I have to assume Kristen Bell made them put it in there.

This movie made me cringe with second-hand embarrassment. Like I actually felt uncomfortable watching it, like I was intruding on some guy's personal sexual fantasy. No wonder I liked Mila Kunis so much in this movie when I was young, she was literally just a male sexual fantasy. But I was young, I didn't know any better. Grown adults actually liked this movie??? It got good reviews??? Jesus Christ.

It wasn't even funny. Almost all the "jokes" fell flat. It was boring. I did sort of like how Jason Segel showed his dick no less than five times in it. Mila Kunis hugging him at the end awakened some latent CFNM fetish in me, so if nothing else I appreciate it for that.

[Raxivace]

Lol I never would have guessed you were into CFNM stuff. All of the related alphabetical variations are probably worth exploring if you're into that though.

[Derived Absurdity]

Oh trust me buddy, I'm way ahead of you.

The Florida Project - It's still great. I don't have much to add beyond what I already said.

It's very nice when a movie like this comes out that shows people living in poverty without being either judgmental and condescending or wallowing in patronizing perseverance porn. It's not big on plot, mostly existing as a series of vignettes about a little girl going on different adventures in a series of run-down motels a few miles outside of Orlando, Florida completely unsupervised until the inevitable happens. It's super-entertaining and well-made and has a lot of heart and empathy for its characters, including the girl's unspeakably awful mother.

I changed my mind about the ending, though, I think it's pretty good. Very sad. Brooklyn Prince made this movie. It's very moving and lush and empathic and humanist and angry and heart-breaking. It's also funny too though, I didn't mention that. It's not all a giant downer. Formally as I said it's near-flawless, although it has some pacing issues. I think the entire scene with the random creep could probably have been cut.

[Derived Absurdity]

Fucking Ãmal (Show Me Love) - A very good film. It's a teenage lesbian coming-of-age drama, not a very unique subgenre even back in 1998, but it displays more open-hearted tenderness and warmth towards its characters than any other movie I know, which makes it stand out a lot. It's extraordinarily emotionally intimate and so unabashedly gentle and sweet that it makes up for its dearth of psychological depth. Even though you don't actually get to know the characters all that well, you certainly feel on the surface like you do, and I guess that counts. I've never seen teenage sexual insecurity and angst (or just teenage life in general) portrayed with as much expert sensitivity and sympathy as here. It's shot in a realist and naturalistic style (I was going to say cinéma vérité to sound smart, but I don't think that's really correct), with grainy hand-held camera and everything, and the performances are appropriately authentic and naturalistic as well. Lukas Moodysson is extremely good at humanizing his characters and making you care very much about them, a talent which he displays seemingly effortlessly here and in the only other two movies of his I've seen, Lilya 4-ever and We're The Best!. Yet the movie is never saccharine because it has rough edges it doesn't shy away from - the teenagers here are realistically stupid and mean and close-minded, especially for a small town; even our protagonists get moments of ugliness and callousness. It makes it more meaningful when they're able to overcome them at the end.

I think this movie ends suddenly and rather stupidly. I am not a fan of how Elin's sister gets absolutely no resolution at the end. She was a pretty major character, and Elin's antagonism towards her and her reluctance to open up to her was a pretty major conflict throughout the entire movie, yet she wasn't even there at the big coming out scene, and we never see her again. She just disappears. The lack of resolution for her makes the movie feel very incomplete and somewhat unsatisfying. I don't know why she didn't get one, but it greatly mars what is otherwise a pretty good film. It's still one of my favorites, though, as its general unflinching sweetness and warmth is unparalleled.

[Derived Absurdity]

Groundhog Day - I read a while ago someone did some online survey among movie nerds asking not what their most-liked movie was, but what their least-disliked movie was. This one won out. It makes sense. This is one of the least dislikeable movies in existence. It may not be your favorite, it may not do that much for you, but who among us actually dislikes it? Except Bill Murray, no one, that's who. I can't really say it's one of my favorites, but... it's obviously very good. It's almost silly of me to even give any opinion on it at this point. It's above that. It's fucking Groundhog Day.

What's also obvious while you watch it is that there was no deep philosophical or theological meaning underneath the surface whatsoever and that it was intended to be precisely what it presents itself as - a lighthearted romantic comedy about some guy becoming a better person, and that's all. The film presented zero hints or clues that there is any deeper subtext to any of the events that happen, and the director himself outright stated as much. I'm sure all the millions of people in the two decades since it came out analyzing its existentialist or Buddhist themes had a lot of fun with it, though.

It has a few problems. The biggest one is that Andie MacDowell is a complete charisma black hole in it. Her performance was grating and I hate it. I've seen this movie multiple times and it never grows on me. The other one is that Phil somehow always meets Ned Ryerson at the exact same time and place every single day despite the fact that he spends each of his mornings differently. One day he rushes out at top speed, the other he chats in the hotel about the weather, and he always meets Ned at the exact same place. Maybe those fan theories about Ned being the Devil are right.

It's also fun to imagine what Phil's last day in the time loop must be from other peoples' perspectives. Rita would see some curmudgeonly asshole who hates everyone one day, and the next day would suddenly see a superhero who goes around town saving everybody and who everyone in town praises for his selflessness. And the townspeople would see some random newscaster who always seems to know right when a horrible accident is about to occur and waltzes right up to stop it right on time. Did none of them have any questions about this? Maybe they're as big a hicks as Phil thought.

[Gendo]

I've been saying for a while now that it's been far too long since I've watched this and need to get around to it again. I've seen it a lot, but it's been many years.

[Cassius Clay]

Can someone explain why some of Dogtooth's sex scenes seem disturbingly realistic?

[Derived Absurdity]

No idea. Don't care.

The Guest - Still a favorite. A success at blending multiple different genres at once. Thriller, action, horror, mystery, pulp, comedy, and political satire. It's also a good pastiche of specific styles - there's a lot of James Cameron, a lot of John Carpenter, a lot of Nicolas Refn, and probably a lot of others. It was atmospheric, intense, spooky, exciting, and fun. It hit pretty much all my buttons when I first saw it. The synthwave soundtrack is one of its best aspects. I want to fuck the soundtrack, Maika Monroe, and Dan Stevens, in that order.

The quality drops noticeably as soon as it cuts to the government facility, but it picks back up by the time they get to the inexplicable school Halloween maze at the end. Quite a lot of the last thirty movies or so is incredibly stupid in a standard action movie sort of way. There's also some strangely shaped character arcs throughout, especially with Maika Monroe's character and her brother. Maika Monroe doesn't like Dan Stevens, and then she does, and then she sort of does and sort of doesn't, and then she likes him again, and then she gets suspicious of him. It all makes logical sense, but on an emotional level it feels haphazard and random. Those are my complaints. It's still good.

[Cassius Clay]

Then just maybe don't comment on a question that's not relevant to you.

Can someone who cares explain or comment on the weirdly realistic sex scenes in Dogtooth?

[Derived Absurdity]

Happy-Go-Lucky - This had a fairly profound effect on me when I first watched it, although I couldn't articulate why back then. I was extremely cynical and depressed at the time (as opposed to now, where I'm cynical and depressed in a more detached and dispassionate way) and I was struck by this movie's unique portrayal of optimism and happiness. It starts with Sally Hawkins being relentlessly upbeat and goofy, clearly baiting the viewer to be annoyed with her and leading us to expect the shoe to drop at some point. To find out that it's a mask and she's harboring some dark secret or something. Or, if not that, that something will eventually make her wise up to the ways of the world and realize that life actually sucks and she needs to get more realistic and tough-minded. After all, she's flighty, she annoys everyone all the time, she doesn't seem to take anything seriously, she's single with no kids and lives in an apartment, she can't even drive; at some point she needs to grow up. That's what's expected. But that doesn't happen. She never changes; she stays upbeat and happy the entire time. The movie's title turns out to be sincere and non-ironic. It turns out that the people who kept telling her that she needs to get her head out of the clouds and face the real world were simply projecting their own deep misery onto her; they were jealous and insecure of how she can seemingly be so content with her life even though she doesn't seem interested in the slightest in conforming to traditional social expectations by getting some high-powered job or a nice house or a kid, and were simply trying to take her down to their level under the guise of giving her cynical world-weary advice. Turns out she was the realistic, grounded one the whole time, the only one reacting to life appropriately. She never displayed any real naivete or empty-headedness or childishness; she's more mature and intelligent than most of the people in the movie she butts heads with.

I think this movie is unique and profound and even somewhat subversive in how it treats optimism and cynicism. Sally Hawkins' character doesn't grow or change throughout; our perception of her does, and our attitude to the entire concept of cynicism. Our expectation (even hope) that life is going to punish her for her carefree disposition at some point is revealed to be just a reflection of our deeply-buried bitterness and disappointment. Most cynicism is stupid and artificial and performative; darkness and negativity does not necessarily equal maturity, and happiness and non-cynicism does not necessarily equal childishness or stupidity. That was a pretty good message for me to hear when I first saw this, and it's a good one now.

[Derived Absurdity]

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - I love this movie almost entirely for how visually luscious and gorgeous it is. Almost every frame of it is strikingly beautiful and artfully composed. From a purely aesthetic standpoint this movie is a marvel; I haven't really seen another that reaches its level. It's the only movie in this franchise to be nominated for a Best Cinematography Oscar, for good reason. Its atmosphere is also deeply moody and ominous and dreamlike, which gives its thin and meaningless story a lot of undeserved dramatic and emotional weight. Bruno Delbonnel, the cinematographer, somehow even found a way to make to make Quidditch look gloomy and melancholy, yet also lush and rich. I wish more major blockbuster movies looked like this.

The script absolutely sucks, at least mostly, and it's a testament to how well this movie is shot that it manages to overcome it. They inexplicably chose to mostly elide the only cool thing about the book - Dumbledore's memories of Tom Riddle - and way overfocus on its worst aspect, the teenage romance. The overarching mystery also feels even dumber and more meaningless here than it does in the book. The random attack on the Burrow in the midpoint was also a very unwise writing decision, even though it was also shot extremely well. Yet the script improved on the book in some aspects - the characters mostly act more mature and subdued, the actor who played Slughorn gave a very subtle and sophisticated performance that was missing from the book, many of the goofier scenes from the book were cut, Ginny Weasley is a normal person here and not a psychopath, and so on. Little things, but they add up.

This movie is extremely enjoyable to watch in a way none of the other ones are. Its world is inviting and comforting in a way the first few movies didn't manage to capture, and also dark and ominous and melancholic in a way the latter few didn't manage to capture. I felt like I actually wanted to be a part of the world here for the first and only time. Also, Emma Watson is insanely, almost ridiculously attractive here. Far more here than anywhere else. That's actually another pretty big reason I like this movie so much. It's not a high-minded reason, but it is what it is.

[Raxivace]

I don't think I've seen any of the last four or five Harry Potter movies since they came out. I remember enjoying them well enough.

[Raxivace]

Can someone who cares explain or comment on the weirdly realistic sex scenes in Dogtooth?

Haven't seen that myself, but I think Jimbo's watched that. Next time he's around you could try asking him about the movie.

[Derived Absurdity]

He Was a Quiet Man - I saw this almost a decade ago and put it on my favorites list because it was edgy and surreal. And it is, and there are certainly some good aspects to it, primarily the acting and the quirky and surreal visuals. It was interesting, and bleakly funny sometimes. But it was extremely predictable and messy and in the end didn't add up to much. Next!

[Cassius Clay]

Can someone who cares explain or comment on the weirdly realistic sex scenes in Dogtooth?

Haven't seen that myself, but I think Jimbo's watched that. Next time he's around you could try asking him about the movie.

Well, I did some research and it turns out that the sex scenes are actually unsimulated. So that explains that.

Still, it's such a strange choice because it could easily have been simulated. But I guess it did add a weird realism that made it wildly uncomfortable to watch. I....I just have so many questions.

And it makes me think of something that's always bothered me about tv/films. When something weird, gross, ugly, traumatic, and/or immoral is being portrayed what it's like for the actors behind the scenes. That 'Cuties' movie controversy(though I feel like most of the backlash was right-wing/conservative nonsense) was the first time I've seen mainstream discussion regarding something like this. Like, sometimes when you portray something like this, the people behind the scenes actually have to do the very things you are portraying as bad/traumatic...even though it's in a controlled setting.

Lena Headey couldn't do the naked walk of shame in GOT, but somebody had to actually act that out. And Headey is someone that seems pretty comfortable with nudity so that says something about how weird that must have been to shoot.

I remember watching some behind the scenes for the movie 'Insidious' and being surprised that the little boy was genuinely scared and crying on set because of the red-face demon.

[Raxivace]

I think a lot of doing nudity or sensitive of shocking material probably comes down to a director's ability to make everyone feel comfortable and safe on set, because there are plenty of examples of films about sensitive issues or fucked up things or whatever having shoots without anyone feeling damaged or whatever (I.e. Salo: 120 Days of Sodom and so on).

You got me wondering about the Walk of Shame thing, so I looked up an article about it. It sounds like the body double actually didn't have too many problems while filming it, while Headey said she wanted to focus more on conveying the actual emotions of Cersei during the scene (And really sequence as a whole strikes me as emotionally complicated itself, since Cersei is one of those characters that you probably have a whole range of feelings on as you watch the whole series). It makes me wonder how far in advance everyone from the writers to the cast knew about the possibility of doing the sequence too, since I can totally buy an actress might have no problems doing nudity in smaller more contained settings (I.e. love scenes) vs. huge crowd scenes like in the Walk of Shame even before you factor everything else in there that's meant to degrade the character.

Any kind of scene like this is a tricky situation involving complicated mix of making everyone feel safe, understanding what's actually being done, and honestly actors needing to understand their own limits and boundaries too.

[Cassius Clay]

Yeah, I get how all that works. It's the directors'/producers' jobs to make everyone comfortable behind the scenes and all that. But, check this out...I happened to watch Cape Fear with some buddies today and the movie contains a perfect example of what I'm talking about. There's an infamous scene where Max Cady forces his thumb into the teenage daughter's mouth. It's a very...umm...sexually uncomfortable scene. And Juliette Lewis was actually underage when that was shot. The scene is meant to be jarring and uncomfortable...which works great. And a director can try to sanitize that behind the scenes all he/she wants but, at the end of the day, an underage Juliette Lewis actually sucked on Robert Deniro's thumb and made out with him for the scene.

[Gendo]

Yeah, I get how all that works. It's the directors'/producers' jobs to make everyone comfortable behind the scenes and all that. But, check this out...I happened to watch Cape Fear with some buddies today and the movie contains a perfect example of what I'm talking about. There's an infamous scene where Max Cady forces his thumb into the teenage daughter's mouth. It's a very...umm...sexually uncomfortable scene. And Juliette Lewis was actually underage when that was shot. The scene is meant to be jarring and uncomfortable...which works great. And a director can try to sanitize that behind the scenes all he/she wants but, at the end of the day, an underage Juliette Lewis actually sucked on Robert Deniro's thumb and made out with him for the scene.

Yeah I mean all of this was basically what I was trying to say back in the Cuties thread. Certain sexual acts and nudity are not comparable to violence specifically because they cannot be faked. You can watch a whole bunch of action movies where people get brutally murdered on screen; but in real life no one was actually murdered to make the movie... the events of the movie do not correspond to the events that happened in real life while making the movie. But if you see a person naked in a movie; then the person actually was really naked in real life; the movie isn't just "pretending" that the person is naked.

[Lord_Lyndon]

I'm still not sure what that means, but imo, a lot of the reason this movie is so gripping is because of the shot composition and the staging. There was very little boring shot/countershot editing here; the constant re-focusing, trading off of focus, dynamic and complicated blocking, lensing (used near the end to make thing seem more claustrophobic and emotionally intense), using camera angles to signify characters' emotional states and changing power dynamics, close-ups to signify moments of primary importance, and so on kept everything moving far more fluidly and engagingly than they otherwise would have been.

This is a quote from your 12 Angry Men review. I thought this was beautifully said.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - I love this movie almost entirely for how visually luscious and gorgeous it is. Almost every frame of it is strikingly beautiful and artfully composed. From a purely aesthetic standpoint this movie is a marvel; I haven't really seen another that reaches its level. It's the only movie in this franchise to be nominated for a Best Cinematography Oscar, for good reason. Its atmosphere is also deeply moody and ominous and dreamlike, which gives its thin and meaningless story a lot of undeserved dramatic and emotional weight. Bruno Delbonnel, the cinematographer, somehow even found a way to make to make Quidditch look gloomy and melancholy, yet also lush and rich. I wish more major blockbuster movies looked like this.

Yeah the cinematography was awesome. Apparently this Delbonnel guy also did the cinematography for mega-popular French film Amelie (2001).

Also, Emma Watson is insanely, almost ridiculously attractive here. Far more here than anywhere else. That's actually another pretty big reason I like this movie so much. It's not a high-minded reason, but it is what it is.

Yeah she is very beautiful. I love her.

[Cassius Clay]

Yeah I mean all of this was basically what I was trying to say back in the Cuties thread. Certain sexual acts and nudity are not comparable to violence specifically because they cannot be faked. You can watch a whole bunch of action movies where people get brutally murdered on screen; but in real life no one was actually murdered to make the movie... the events of the movie do not correspond to the events that happened in real life while making the movie. But if you see a person naked in a movie; then the person actually was really naked in real life; the movie isn't just "pretending" that the person is naked.

I didn't really know where I stood on the issue, and still don't tbh(especially since I haven't actually watched 'Cuties', but have seen some of the controversial scenes)...but, again, I did feel that like 80 percent of the outrage was conservative, pizzagate-type bullshit...while the rest was from legitimate concern...making it at least a conversation worth having.

And it's not just with sex/nude scenes or scenes with underage actors. It can be scenes like someone playing a overtly racist character and having to use racial slurs for a scene. I'm sure a lot of work goes into making sure everything is safe, kosher, and comfortable behind the scenes...and there has to be a lot of trust there...but, someone(usually a white actor) still has to potentially yell racial slurs at a person of color if that's what the scene calls for. And that's....really weird to me.

I thought of another good example earlier today but I can't remember it. Fuck.

[Derived Absurdity]

Thanks Lyndon.

Heavenly Creatures - Just watched it for a second time and my opinion is unchanged. I think it's really great. I have nothing to add to what I already said.

Heavenly Creatures - Well, that was simply incredible, I think. It instantly cemented itself as one of my new favorite movies. I kind of fell in love with every single aspect of it. It's hard to pick what I like most about it - I love the absolutely effortless blending of surreal frenetic vivid energy and intensity with the heavy emotional gravity its subject matter required of it, to the extent that due to the film's relentless subjectivity and sense of empathy they mutually reinforced and complemented each other instead of clashing. This film shows vividly that you don't need to be austere and restrained, or epic in scope, to have emotional maturity. I love the naturalistic way it charted the path its characters took so that it seemed believable; I love the humane and sympathetic viewpoint it took, so that it wasn't judgmental and moralistic but also not exculpatory of its characters' behavior; it clearly sympathized very much with them and strongly identified with what it imagined they were going through. The movie felt completely unhinged in every possible way, but purposely, as a demonstration of the almost unfathomably turbulent and chaotic emotional lives of hyper-imaginative and intensely troubled teenagers being subject to extremely damaging and confusing experiences. I thought this film was incredibly compelling in every way, and immensely impressive considering how experimental and risky it was and what subject matter it took on and how easily it could have failed.

This shouldn't take away from the fact of it being excellent on its own, but it worked strongly on me because there's a lot of parts to it I connected with - being an emotionally chaotic and at least somewhat disturbed teenager who often retreated into imagination and fantasy worlds, who felt incessantly under siege by the outside world and often from my own head and whose only real means of coping was mental dissociation, who was incredibly impulsive and dangerously obsessive, and who had a delusionally high opinion of certain aspects of myself. Peter Jackson evidently felt the same way, as his empathy for the protagonists is at honestly kind of insane levels. It made little attempt at serious psychological depth; by the end we still can't give a clear answer as to why the characters were driven to murder, but that's fitting; even the characters have no idea why they did it, no one else does either, so why should Jackson think he does? This isn't a psychoanalytic character study, more like an intensely expressionistic experiment in radical empathy.

I like it when I have this much of a reaction to a movie. Even the movies I like don't generally make me feel much. I almost forgot what they can do, how much power they can potentially have. That's kind of why I like movies so much; I can barely describe how this one made me feel, it's not straightforward in any way, and it isn't even all positive, as the movie is of course disturbing and violent, but I thought it was compelling and wrenching and I can't get it out of my head.

[Faustus5]

Heavenly Creatures - Just watched it for a second time and my opinion is unchanged. I think it's really great. I have nothing to add to what I already said.

I need to watch this one again. The key, as you say several times, is the empathy the film has, the way it just completely embraces the mental states of the girls without judging or attempting to bracket them with "understanding".

Also, the soundtrack is just unbelievably good. I think Jackson's use of music in the film was as important as anything else you can point to in it.

[Derived Absurdity]

Yeah, I agree the soundtrack was also pretty good.

I should add that the last scene is honestly quite horrific, and the tension leading up to it was unbearable. Not many violent film scenes get me as much as it did. It was extremely well-done. Everything about the movie was well-done, but the ending especially so.

Here Comes the Devil- A low-budget Mexican horror film. I put this on my list a very long time ago because it was weird, bleak, gritty, and somewhat unique (to me) and unpredictable. Some things it is not, however, are fun, entertaining, scary, or particularly good. You don't really know where it's going, for the most part, but when it gets there you don't feel anything or particularly care. It also doesn't fall neatly into one genre - it's part slasher, part demon possession, part cheap 70s sexploitation. Like I said, sort of unique, but not very good. It also seems to not like women very much, or at least not like it when they have sex. The world in general forgot this movie almost immediately after it saw it, and I probably should have too.

[Faustus5]

Heavenly Creatures - Just watched it for a second time and my opinion is unchanged. I think it's really great. I have nothing to add to what I already said.

I may have mentioned this already in another thread, but did you know that one of the two girls in real life grew up to be a best selling crime fiction author? (Real name Juliet Hulme, authorial pseudonym Anne Perry.) I used to work in a book store and loved dropping this bomb on her fans whenever they bought one of her books.

[Derived Absurdity]

Yeah. Apparently her identity became known shortly after the movie's release. I wonder what she thinks of it.

Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey - This movie has huge, gigantic nostalgia value for me. I watched it obsessively as a kid, and haven't watched it since for about fifteen years. It holds up, surprisingly. The voice acting is great and the animals are great and the pacing is fine and the scenery is great and the soundtrack is great and the emotional beats work. It's happy when it wants to be and it's sad when it wants to be and it's charming when it wants to be and it's funny when it wants to be. Some of the funny lines were actually pretty good. The ending was still very effective.

I found it funny how full of shit Shadow was throughout the whole movie. Literally every single decision he made was completely wrong. The only reason they even went on the journey in the first place was that he incorrectly thought his family was in trouble. Then he thought they were only a day away from home, when it turns out to be weeks. Then he fails to save Sassy from the river, and even though she survived if she had died it would have been his fault for sending them out there in the first place. Then he turns out to be wrong about the existence of the pound, and then he turns out to be wrong about the necessity of escaping from it. And then at the end, just to round it all off, he falls into a hole because he didn't watch where he was going. I'm just saying, he's supposed to be the wise old leader of the group, and yet he was wrong about everything. Chance was always more right than he was, maybe he should have been the leader. And on top of it all, he (Shadow) was a condescending asshole to Chance throughout the whole movie for no reason. I'm glad he escaped from the hole at the end, but still.

I wasn't aware this movie had a subtitle until just now. I always thought it was just "Homeward Bound." I don't like it. This is a pure, simple movie; it should have a pure, simple title to fit. I also didn't know it was a remake, but I guess that's where the subtitle comes from. Another tidbit is that Sally Field, who voiced Sassy, was apparently in a bad mood throughout shooting because she thought she was slumming it by voicing a talking cat. It kind of fit her character, so it worked out.

I have nothing else to say here. It's pretty good. Also, if you want, here's a cute video about it I just found:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cnstd0A ... 1zW3OD3BJQ

[Gendo]

If you didn't know about the subtitle part of the title; are you aware of the movie "The Incredible Journey" (1963)? Homeward Bound is Disney's remake of their own film. The original is very similar; though the animals don't talk.