The Pitters' Place

Flicks re-seen

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Little Miss Sunshine


I'll write things later if I feel like it.

The Hateful Eight - 8.5/10

Three hours long. Intermission in the middle. First half's sole purpose is to introduce the characters and the situation. Second half is when the characters start doing things.

So, this is a Western take on the movies Clue and Reservoir Dogs with a splash of Monty Python (Tim Roth straight up does an impression of Terry Jones). It's very funny and extremely violent and the "n-word" is said way way too much, but, much like he did in Django, Quentin provides a theme of black man's redemption against his white oppressors. And it sort of works, but not really because, again like Django, the black protagonist is dependent on a white aide.

Anyway, it's entertaining enough. Not to be taken too seriously.

The previews made it look a lot like django, is it different enough?

Yes, very different.

Carol - 7/10

Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara fall in love and go on a road trip and that negatively affects Cate's ongoing custody battle because women in the 50s aren't supposed to have relations with women. That's about it. Good acting. Good heart-wrenching stuff. I'm sure the two of them will be nominated for all kinds of things.

Brooklyn

Ridiculously cheesy crap. Waste of time and money. Made me strongly consider walking out of a movie for the first time ever. It's like a fuckin parody.

Er, are you talking about that 98%-on-Rotten-Tomatoes, nominated-for-so-many-awards-it-has-its-own-Wikipedia-page Brooklyn? What was bad about it?

Yes. Everything. It was boring, soulless, corny. Just plain weird. It was astonishingly terrible.

The Revenant - 10/10

Atypical Good vs. Evil revenge tale. Leo and Tom Hardy deliver a couple stone cold performances. And it is so visually beautiful. I don't want to reveal any plot details, but this is a huge departure for Innaritu (director of Birdman, Babel, 21 Grams etc). It's quite nearly pure genius.

WARNING: This film requires lots of patience (but it is well worth it ).

I wanted to see it a while back when I saw the second trailer, but then I heard the pacing was painfully slow. Visually, it looks like a pretty movie tho.

Extremely painfully slow.

Saw it. It's a crazy experience. Beautifully shot. I actually enjoyed the pacing. I didn't expect to leave the theater with intimate knowledge on what it might feel like to get attacked by a Grizzly...the helplessness of it all...the casual brutality. Dear God in heaven...

From a political/social perspective, there might be a few issues...but overall good movie.

Yeah the bear attack was brutal.

Look. I even unconsciously capitalized "grizzly" because of how intimidating that experience was.

It would be difficult to top the intensity of the grizzly attack at the end of Fox and the Hound, though.

Also, I don't think there are any cuts in the scene. Like that sex scene from 'Inherent Vice', something about the continuity adds to a sense of realism and builds powerful tension.

After a second viewing, I'm changing my rating to a 10/10.

Spotlight

Another movie about Boston being a tight-knit community in which no one's supposed to rat on anyone. Except this time it's about priests molesting kids, so eventually something gets done. Pretty good movie. Very funny in parts. Ruffalo deserves his Oscar nomination. McAdams does not.

sikax wrote:Spotlight

Another movie about Boston being a tight-knit community in which no one's supposed to rat on anyone. Except this time it's about priests molesting kids, so eventually something gets done. Pretty good movie. Very funny in parts. Ruffalo deserves his Oscar nomination. McAdams does not.

Of the 3 movies I saw this weekend, Spotlight was easily the best.

I also agree with your assessment on Ruffalo & McAdams. I like the latter just fine (thoufh I admot part of that might be because she is very easy to look at), but I don't remember that muxh about her role other than she talked to a few people and was always with Keaton when they talked to that one lawyer. Oh, and she stopped going to church with her Grandmother. But yeah, there was no character development worthy of an oscar in that role.

Anomalisa

Masturbation. Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine, Being John Malkovich etc.) made an interestingly animated flick about a corporate-type having a mid-life crisis. He has an affair and gradually goes insane and it's....so.....boring and meaningless. Lots of good laughs, but mostly artsy bullshit masturbation.

sikax wrote:Anomalisa

Masturbation. Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine, Being John Malkovich etc.) made an interestingly animated flick about a corporate-type having a mid-life crisis. He has an affair and gradually goes insane and it's....so.....boring and meaningless. Lots of good laughs, but mostly artsy bullshit masturbation.

How do you feel about other Kaufman? I haven't seen Anomalisa, but I've loved all his other stuff.

Eternal Sunshine is good, Being John Malkovich is better, and Adaptation is better (haven't yet seen Synecdoche, New York, but I hear good things). Things happen in those films. Problems are solved. Anomalisa has none of that. We follow a man over the course of one day go from hating his boring domestic life to meeting a stranger and wanting to run away with her and then going back to hating his life. There are flashes of interesting ideas during his insane ramblings, but, no. There's also a way-too-long sex scene between two animated puppets.

Hail, Caesar! - 10/10

Hilarious. If you enjoy The Big Lebowski, you'll love this. The Coens at their finest. Everyone delivers top-notch comedy (except for Scarlett Johansson, who has no business trying to be funny. God damn she's annoying). Anyway, go see it.

sikax wrote:Hail, Caesar! - 10/10

Hilarious. If you enjoy The Big Lebowski, you'll love this. The Coens at their finest. Everyone delivers top-notch comedy (except for Scarlett Johansson, who has no business trying to be funny. God damn she's annoying). Anyway, go see it.

What if one didn't enjoy Big Lebowski but enjoyed this?

Also, I'm re-evaluating my rating to 7.5/10 for Hail, Caesar (not related to your own review)

It would be higher, but it needed more Hobie (especially with Laurence Lorenz interactions).

Unvoiced_Apollo wrote:It would be higher, but it needed more Hobie (especially with Laurence Lorenz interactions).

Yeah, those two were brilliant

Flick re-seen

25th Hour - 8.7/10
Spike Lee's allegory on the aftermath of 9/11. Ed Norton plays a drug dealer living his last day in New York City before heading to prison for seven years. Lots of good stuff, especially the ending monologue summing up the fate of the United States.

sikax wrote:The Big Short

A lot of technical jargon about banks and real estate that I didn't understand adding up to explaining the housing crisis and global economic collapse in the mid-to-late-2000s. Entertaining performances from Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Steve Carrell and others. Ultimately, however, not really digestible. Informative, maybe, if you're into that kind of thing.

I haven't seen it myself, but you're not the first person I've heard say that.

Curiously enough though I used to work in Financial Services and a few of my friends from that world have seen it and said that they have dumbed it down to the point where it doesn't really mean anything.

Which doesn't really surprise me. Trying to get across the important (technical!) details of these things in two hours is rather ambitious.

Margot Robie in a bubble bath is all I needed to understand.

I'll have to rewatch, but skipping over all the technical things...

Seriously, the short of it is that more & more people were buying houses who couldn't afford them. There are securities bonds supported on the assumption that a)real estate always goes up & b)people pay their mortgages. Without those mortgages being paid, those bonds were not AAA but rather, worth less than sh!t. A few people tried to bet against the market based on information everyone could get access to, but the ongoing collusion between banks and bond raters (ex: Moody's, S&P, etc.) to fix the bonds at the highest rating further expanded the bubble.

But what we call a bubble, would really be closer to a Jenga tower (as shown in the movie), with certain levels of blocks representing certain bond ratings. As the amount of mortgage bonds increased without the money to back any bonds (because not enough people were paying their mortgages), the more holes there were in the tower. Eventually, the market was pushed too far & the tower came crashing down.

At a very simplistic level, yes.

The reality is more complicated (and more dishonest/evil). In layman's terms security bonds were set up, misrepresented, sold and then short sold against (bet against) all by the same organisations. i.e. they set up them up deliberately knowing they would fail with the intent of duping other people into buying them and to add insult injury they profited from a second time when they lost money too.

The credit ratings agency were more negligent than complacent. (Not that that absolves them by any stretch of the imagination).

The fact that there haven't been thousands of bankers in court and then in jail just shows how corrupt the whole system is (and how little people outside the industry really understand it - where are you going to find a jury that could stay awake during the trial let alone understand it?)

The traders doing this knew a crash was coming and were "just trying to make a quick buck". What they hadn't realised was that so many of them were doing it and on such a massive scale. And that's what caused the problem.

And it was exacerbated by things like rigging the LIBOR or FOREX rates (which gets even more technical) and is a separate issue but again speaks to a culture where you have people playing God with other people's money/livelihoods, and mis-selling products to private customers (like the PPI issues in the UK and the next thing - watch this space! - will be Interest Only mortgages - there will be a big scandal about those over the next 5 years or so).

Zoolander 2
Pretty much how sequels of brilliant classic comedies go: terribly. A few good laughs, but mostly bullshit.

The Voices - ??/10
Ryan Reynolds plays a mentally disturbed person who hears voices from his pets, a psychotic cat and an affable dog. He wrestles with which one to side with, and ends up siding with the cat, killing three women from work. It's a very VERY strange movie. Pitch black comedy. Worth it.

sikax wrote:Zoolander 2
Pretty much how sequels of brilliant classic comedies go: terribly. A few good laughs, but mostly bullshit.

The Voices - ??/10
Ryan Reynolds plays a mentally disturbed person who hears voices from his pets, a psychotic cat and an affable dog. He wrestles with which one to side with, and ends up siding with the cat, killing three women from work. It's a very VERY strange movie. Pitch black comedy. Worth it.

Didn't want to wtch two Ryan Reynolds movies over the weekend?

Meh, I'll probably see Deadpool this weekend. Don't really care, though.

sikax wrote:Meh, I'll probably see Deadpool this weekend. Don't really care, though.

I will slways choose the well-reviewed comic book movie over the terribly reviewed comedy sequel.

Triple 9 - 8.75/10
I love these gritty modern cop movies. Training Day, Street Kings, End of Watch, Hard Times etc. Good stuff. This one has an amazing cast. There's a group of dirty cops who rob banks. Then a rookie cop becomes one of their partners and they get it in their head to kill him to serve as a nice distraction to pull off a big job. Great edge-of-your-seat stuff. You don't really know who's dirty and who's clean for a while. Worth a look.

A Walk Among the Tombstones- 7.5/10
Liam Neeson being a bad ass private detective tracking down crazy murderers/kidnappers. Pretty sweet.

Transcendence - 5/10
Silly thing with Johnny Depp as an artificial intelligence scientist who's killed by these neo-Luddite radicals and then his dead brain is fused with his A.I. machine and he gets way too powerful and destroys the world. Or something. Really disappointing considering the great cast and that the director is the guy who did the photography for all of Nolan's flicks.

I Origins - 6.5/10
Some doctors stumble across the concept that humans with identical eyeballs can share memories and emotions and stuff. Some interesting moments but mostly got lost in its own ass.

I've been wanting to see I Origins ever since seeing a preview.

It's enjoyable in a few ways. The main guy is way too Richard Dawkins-y though. Your protagonist can't be a diabolical douchebag.

Eddie the Eagle - Fun little sports movie that hits all the cliches, but I completely Taran Edgerton the title character & the comed is pretty good. 6.9/10

Particularly disappointed with Transcendence because it was supposed to be the first big blockbuster movie to take on mind uploading/singularity stuff in an intelligent way. Also Johnny Depp.

Ex Machina was way better.

Yeah, it was good.

Noah

For some reason I really liked this one. Darren Aronofsky--director of strange things like Requiem for a Dream, Pi, Black Swan, The Fountain, and The Wrestler--directs a cast of white folks playing Biblical characters who portray the story of Noah and his boat in a very Shakespearean way. Some interesting artsy fartsy scenes, a lot of overacting from Jennifer Connelly, and Russell Crowe being Russell Crowe.

Mojave
Oscar Isaac and Garrett Hedlund go head-to-head in a very strange thriller. Hedlund is a big-shot Hollywood-type who goes out into the desert one weekend to find himself or whatever. He runs into crazy desert hippy Isaac who has killed before and attempts to get the better of Hedlund. Hedlund escapes, but not before accidentally killing a cop and running back to LA. So, Isaac hunts him down. The rest of the movie is them getting very very close to a final showdown, but instead just having weird philosophical conversations. They finally do have their final showdown, and, well, yeah. The movie ends. It provides a couple of good scenes to talk about, but as a whole it falls flat. Written and directed by the guy who wrote The Departed.

Bone Tomahawk
Kurt Russell is a town sheriff in the wild West. One day, a couple of townsfolk are kidnapped. It's evidenced that a particular tribe of people have taken them. These people are not quite considered Natives. They're something else, something extremely primitive. They're referred to as "troglodytes". They're fuckin cannibals. They use animal bones as weapons. They don't have a language. The only form of communication seemingly are loud shrieks enhanced by strange implants in their throat that look like extra human teeth. Anyway, Kurt, his elderly and incompetent deputy, a local bachelor/military-type fella, and the crippled husband of one of the kidnapped, set out on a rescue mission. They have themselves a pretty typical Western journey, with horse thieves and fighting and jokes and whatnot. Then they get to the troglodyte camp and things get hairy. Highly recommend this one. Be advised: quite a high level of grossness upon entering the troglodyte camp.

Frank - 10/10

sikax wrote:Frank - 10/10

It's like you're not even trying anymore.

That's not even a real movie.

Hardcore Henry - 0/10

Such a waste of time that it's a waste of time saying it was a waste of time. This is a straight-to-Netflix type of B-movie reserved for sequels to Sharknado. It belongs on the CW. How in the flying fuck did this make it to theaters? Why did I watch it? These are good questions.

sikax wrote:Hardcore Henry - 0/10

Such a waste of time that it's a waste of time saying it was a waste of time. This is a straight-to-Netflix type of B-movie reserved for sequels to Sharknado. It belongs on the CW. How in the flying fuck did this make it to theaters? Why did I watch it? These are good questions.

Would it be worth seeing if one was high? Asking for a friend.

Only that particular kind of high where the world's parts kind of melt together and nothing matters.

sikax wrote:Hardcore Henry - 0/10

Such a waste of time that it's a waste of time saying it was a waste of time. This is a straight-to-Netflix type of B-movie reserved for sequels to Sharknado. It belongs on the CW. How in the flying fuck did this make it to theaters? Why did I watch it? These are good questions.

I didn't have much interest in it because the trailer gave me a bit of motion sickness (and this is coming from a toller coaster junkie). and it looked like it was all action & no real character. If t had the tiniest shred of character or I had a 4dX theatee near me, I'd see it.

Keanu
Exactly what I expected in a Key & Peele movie. Pretty funny.

The Lobster
Excellent first half, exhausting second half. The idea was so good and the execution was mediocre.

Genius
A biopic about Thomas Wolfe. Pretty great if you're into that kind of thing. I also have a man-crush on Jude Law.

The Neon Demon
Awesome strangeness to be expected from Nicolas Winding Refn, except this one is much more disturbing than his previous two films. In a good way.