I made a 2018 movies thread too

Derived Absurdity
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I made a 2018 movies thread too

Post by Derived Absurdity »

Movies I saw in 2018. Not necessarily movies that came out in 2018. Also they're not all movies. Whatever.

The Florida Project - 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 agree some of the critics online in saying the ending is stupid and undercuts what I saw as the movie's entire point, but besides that last minute, it was great. It has to be tough to strike that balance and depict poverty in a manner which is neither romanticizing it nor caricaturing it, as well as the people, so the few movies that manage to do it should be cherished. Also the children were some of the most naturalistic actors I've ever seen and the little girl embodies her character just as well as any professional actor.

The Leftovers (season 2 - 3) - This was just a bunch of stupid random bullshit. Yeah, it had good cinematography and characterization (sometimes), and it was shot and had the gravitas of some prestige drama, but doesn't change the fact that this entire show was just a bunch of stupid random bullshit. I guess I should have known that going in, considering who made it. It didn't really promise to be anything else, so I guess expecting anything else was my fault. I guess the randomness and arbitrariness of the plot was supposed to be a reflection of the randomness and arbitrariness of the universe, but that doesn't justify anything from an artistic standpoint and it doesn't justify me wasting however many fucking dozen hours of my short life watching this stupid random bullshit.

A Tale of Two Sisters - Sad as much as it is creepy. Which is very good, because ghost stories are kind of inherently sad and it's an issue with scary movies when they don't try to incorporate that. The first hour or so was pretty boring, as it was essentially just a haunted house movie with two Japanese women, but from then on it turned into a somewhat complicated mind screw, although it wouldn't have been that complicated if the events were just told in chronological order. But that wouldn't be as fun, I guess.

Planet Earth II - This was obviously and predictably great. I hate nature.

Princess Cyd - This is a very low-budget coming-of-age movie that pretty much flew completely under the radar. It's not really that great, but I liked it a lot. But I usually like these types of movies. It's very tender-hearted and and gentle and emotional and all that shit, almost to the point where it was embarrassing. There's not a lot of drama or sensationalism or excitement at all. It's very low-key and restrained from beginning to end, which is refreshing. The protagonist is insanely cute, so that probably helped. I actually hunted around and finally paid for this movie before I realized it was on Netflix this entire time. Jfc.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

Post by Gendo »

Hey, I've seen one of those things!
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

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Leftovers Season 2 and 3 are bad because they abandon the relative groundedness and focus on the emotional drama of the first season to instead regurgitate comic book-y plot points from the later seasons of Lost.

I still think they have some decent episodes (Mainly the two that focus on Matt, and the Jarden community is fine as a premise), but it all falls apart once Kevin wakes up in the Hotel World.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

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Leftovers Season 3 has a 98 on Metacritic. Is it all LIES then? Somehow, the 2 people who didn't like it (out of 100) are in this thread.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

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maz89 wrote:Leftovers Season 3 has a 98 on Metacritic. Is it all LIES then? Somehow, the 2 people who didn't like it (out of 100) are in this thread.
Television criticism is almost universally bad so yes.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

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Raxivace wrote:
maz89 wrote:Leftovers Season 3 has a 98 on Metacritic. Is it all LIES then? Somehow, the 2 people who didn't like it (out of 100) are in this thread.
Television criticism is almost universally bad so yes.
Oh yeah, I remember we discussed this.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

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Those are probably the same people who liked Boyhood, which was also a bunch of random stupid bullshit.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

I haven't seen any of these. :(
Derived Absurdity wrote:Those are probably the same people who liked Boyhood, which was also a bunch of random stupid bullshit.
I wasn't a huge fan of that film (was rather disappointed given my love for Linklater in general), but I think that's much too harsh. My general take away wasn't that the "bunch of random bullshit" was bad, but that he didn't do "a bunch of random bullshit (trying to evoke the passage of time through ordinary life with a profound wistfulness)" nearly as well as Ozu; but, TBF, nobody can, except maybe Hou hsiao-hsien.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

Post by Derived Absurdity »

Eva Yojimbo wrote:I haven't seen any of these. :(
Derived Absurdity wrote:Those are probably the same people who liked Boyhood, which was also a bunch of random stupid bullshit.
I wasn't a huge fan of that film (was rather disappointed given my love for Linklater in general), but I think that's much too harsh. My general take away wasn't that the "bunch of random bullshit" was bad, but that he didn't do "a bunch of random bullshit (trying to evoke the passage of time through ordinary life with a profound wistfulness)" nearly as well as Ozu; but, TBF, nobody can, except maybe Hou hsiao-hsien.
Boyhood was one of the most un-wistful movies I've ever seen. The thing Princess Cyd did right that Boyhood did wrong was not think that simply showing a bunch of random meaningless scenes in chronological order in some person's life is going to automatically be emotionally resonant or meaningful. Princess Cyd was a hundred times more authentic and human and wistful than Boyhood was and it wasn't even particularly good.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

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Derived Absurdity wrote:Those are probably the same people who liked Boyhood, which was also a bunch of random stupid bullshit.
*awkward pause* I liked Boyhood. Even more than Yojimbo did. I thought it was a rousing coming of age story, and very poignant in how it captured the lives of the people who were a part of the main protagonist's life (you are a product of the people around you). An argument can made against the hyped "real time" conceit of the film, but honestly, seeing Patricia Arquette age 2x faster than Hawke and break down in the film's climax, tearing up about the absence of future milestones in her life... was deeply affecting.

So maybe I can be the person who likes stupid, random bullshit like Leftovers Season 2 and 3 after all? [wink]

Haven't seen Princess Cyd.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

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One thing I'll say in favor of Leftovers Season 2 is that it has one of my favorite punchlines in recent memory (Though I'll try to make this spoiler free).

Character 1: So yeah I did some prison time for attempted murder.

Character 2: What happened?

Character 1: I guess I wasn't trying hard enough.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Derived Absurdity wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote:I haven't seen any of these. :(
Derived Absurdity wrote:Those are probably the same people who liked Boyhood, which was also a bunch of random stupid bullshit.
I wasn't a huge fan of that film (was rather disappointed given my love for Linklater in general), but I think that's much too harsh. My general take away wasn't that the "bunch of random bullshit" was bad, but that he didn't do "a bunch of random bullshit (trying to evoke the passage of time through ordinary life with a profound wistfulness)" nearly as well as Ozu; but, TBF, nobody can, except maybe Hou hsiao-hsien.
Boyhood was one of the most un-wistful movies I've ever seen. The thing Princess Cyd did right that Boyhood did wrong was not think that simply showing a bunch of random meaningless scenes in chronological order in some person's life is going to automatically be emotionally resonant or meaningful. Princess Cyd was a hundred times more authentic and human and wistful than Boyhood was and it wasn't even particularly good.
I haven't seen Princess Cyd, but if I go back to my Ozu comparison, I think the reason why Ozu's "random scenes in chronological order" works is because his rigorous cinematic formalism gives a structure to it, so you have this potent combination of the random flow of time and its events and the highly structured narration that it's filtered through that creates all these rhymes/echoes. IE, there's more of a balance between the notions of time as linear and new VS time as cyclical and repetitive.

In Boyhood, I don't think it's that the randomness is meaningless or without any emotional resonance, but rather it's just lacking the formal sophistication to enhance what's there. To make another analogy, it's a bit like free jazz in that it's a bit too much improv without a good theme/ground to work from. The emotional moments just seem to come a bit out of nowhere. Compare them to something like the end of Late Spring where the entire film seems like every moment and gesture has built up to that last scene, and Ozu's able to do it in complete silence without any histrionics... it's just profound and magical in a way that Boyhood wasn't.

FWIW, I think that approach works well in many of Linklater's other films that feel more like stream-of-conscious shotguns of ideas/events (Slacker, Before Trilogy, Waking Life), but when you're spanning as much time as he is in Boyhood I think you need something more... solid to work from.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

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^ What he said.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

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I tried to watch The Leftovers because The Doctor was in it. You couldn't fix that shit with a sonic screwdriver and a TARDIS.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

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Eva Yojimbo wrote:In Boyhood, I don't think it's that the randomness is meaningless or without any emotional resonance, but rather it's just lacking the formal sophistication to enhance what's there. To make another analogy, it's a bit like free jazz in that it's a bit too much improv without a good theme/ground to work from. The emotional moments just seem to come a bit out of nowhere. Compare them to something like the end of Late Spring where the entire film seems like every moment and gesture has built up to that last scene, and Ozu's able to do it in complete silence without any histrionics... it's just profound and magical in a way that Boyhood wasn't.
While I get what you're saying, I can't help but feel that the "emotional moments coming out nowhere" was precisely what Linklater was gunning for. "Random" episodes strung together in a reflection of life. Development on some fronts, no closure on others. All of it being an attempt to capture the varied, unpredictable forces that shape a boy into becoming who he will be on his journey from adolescence to adulthood. I think the bittersweet quality really comes from the juxtaposition of this coming-of-age story with the imperfect lives of the adults surrounding him, who offer a glimpse of how life ultimately alternates between happiness and sadness, love and heartbreak, purposefulness and uncertainty. The thing you criticize about Boyhood is part of what made it affecting for me as its tone really comes from Linklater's decision to play it straight: stitching the 'random' episodes organically and letting the content speak for itself, without build-up to any one moment and without drawing attention to the artifice of cinema via auteurial interjection (which seemed fitting for a slice of life drama that spanned decades irl).

I agree it wasn't as visually masterful as Ozu's best, but c'mon, that's just setting up any movie for failure. ;)
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

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Raxivace wrote:One thing I'll say in favor of Leftovers Season 2 is that it has one of my favorite punchlines in recent memory (Though I'll try to make this spoiler free).

Character 1: So yeah I did some prison time for attempted murder.

Character 2: What happened?

Character 1: I guess I wasn't trying hard enough.
[laugh]
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

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I'm more with maz on Boyhood. Perhaps I'm a little softer on Linklater for not being as good Ozu since, like with The Revenant and Tarkovsky, not a whole lot of other directors in America are even trying to be that.

If I were to launch a criticism at the film, it might be at the abusive father plotline for being more like traditional narrative cinema than the rest of the film is (Though I like how we never quite hear about the step-siblings again IIRC).
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

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I have a genuinely hard time putting myself in the headspace of anyone who claims to like Boyhood or says its actually a well-made film with solid artistic merit. That is a perspective I legitimately cannot comprehend. To me the movie was The Last Airbender-level awful.

I realize this puts me at odds with virtually every critic in the country and a sizable number of regular people, but I'm good with that.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

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Boyhood was great.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

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maz89 wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote:In Boyhood, I don't think it's that the randomness is meaningless or without any emotional resonance, but rather it's just lacking the formal sophistication to enhance what's there. To make another analogy, it's a bit like free jazz in that it's a bit too much improv without a good theme/ground to work from. The emotional moments just seem to come a bit out of nowhere. Compare them to something like the end of Late Spring where the entire film seems like every moment and gesture has built up to that last scene, and Ozu's able to do it in complete silence without any histrionics... it's just profound and magical in a way that Boyhood wasn't.
While I get what you're saying, I can't help but feel that the "emotional moments coming out nowhere" was precisely what Linklater was gunning for. "Random" episodes strung together in a reflection of life. Development on some fronts, no closure on others. All of it being an attempt to capture the varied, unpredictable forces that shape a boy into becoming who he will be on his journey from adolescence to adulthood. I think the bittersweet quality really comes from the juxtaposition of this coming-of-age story with the imperfect lives of the adults surrounding him, who offer a glimpse of how life ultimately alternates between happiness and sadness, love and heartbreak, purposefulness and uncertainty. The thing you criticize about Boyhood is part of what made it affecting for me as its tone really comes from Linklater's decision to play it straight: stitching the 'random' episodes organically and letting the content speak for itself, without build-up to any one moment and without drawing attention to the artifice of cinema via auteurial interjection (which seemed fitting for a slice of life drama that spanned decades irl).

I agree it wasn't as visually masterful as Ozu's best, but c'mon, that's just setting up any movie for failure. ;)
I guess I'm just more of the mind that if you're going to do the "random events" on a plot level, then it's a boon to have more structure on a formal level; at least with a film that's spanning that much time. The formlessness doesn't bother me in the Linklater films that unfold more in real time. I mean, I can certainly understand why this wouldn't bother many and how they could still find all the emotional moments really affecting, but the randomness just took me out of it somewhat. I still gave it a 7/10 IIRC, so it's not like I hated it or anything; I was just disappointed given the hype and my love of other Linklater's.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

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Derived Absurdity wrote:I have a genuinely hard time putting myself in the headspace of anyone who claims to like Boyhood or says its actually a well-made film with solid artistic merit. That is a perspective I legitimately cannot comprehend. To me the movie was The Last Airbender-level awful.

I realize this puts me at odds with virtually every critic in the country and a sizable number of regular people, but I'm good with that.
Just curious DA, do you like any other films you'd (or others would) describe as "slice of life" dramas? Some people really like/dislike those kinds of films in general. I tend to really like them, even over more traditional plot-based films. Cafe Lumiere is an example from recent years that I love, though not one I'd recommend without reservations unless you don't have a problem with films where almost nothing superficially happens.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

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I do like slice of life dramas. Princess Cyd and The Florida Project could probably be loosely called slice of life dramas. Both of them were almost as plotless and formless as Boyhood, only they were entertaining, authentic, well-structured, and well-made. Like I said as The Florida Project is mostly a series of vignettes about the aimless adventures of a girl during her formative years, it could be compared to Boyhood, although there was more meaning and authenticity in any one scene of it than in the entire movie of Boyhood.

My problem with Boyhood was not really the lack of plot. Movies lacking plot are fine as long as they have a story or anything else to make up for it. The Florida Project was almost plotless but the story was running under the cover the entire time. With Boyhood, there was nothing.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

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Fair enough. While I can certainly understand someone being bored/underwhelmed by it, I'm a bit puzzled by how much you seem to hate it! Unless you just hate slice-of-life type stuff, it doesn't really seem like a hateable kind of film.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

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Because it was like three hours long and it was the most boring movie I've ever seen, besides maybe The Grudge and Enter the Void.

It was three whole hours of just... nothing. Nothing.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

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I haven't seen Princess Cyd or Flordia Project, but everything else you keep comparing Boyhood to are straight genre films. It just makes me wonder if you're really as okay with a lack of a plot as you claim.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

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I don't know what you mean.
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James White - this was really good. It's a pretty powerful and short movie about a self-centered yet good-hearted fuck up who's forced to take responsibility and grow up after his mother's cancer returns. It goes by in no time at all. It's sort of like Princess Cyd in that on the surface it's lightweight and has no melodrama or saccharine moments, but it's extremely well-made and moving despite/because of that. The protagonist is very real and relatable and insanely well-acted and as a fuck up who doesn't like responsibility I connected with him on a deep level. As a character study this was one of the best ones I've seen.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - I generally try to go into movies with a blank slate, so I didn't know much about this movie except that it was divisive, with critics loving it but a lot of people disliking it (the primary reason being its treatment of race). Well, I didn't feel strong emotions about it either way, but on the whole I disliked it. There were so many ridiculous plot contrivances and dead ends in it that I stopped keeping track (the plot with the dentist pressing charges just ended for no reason, the new chief didn't arrest Dixon for throwing a guy out of a window right in front of him or even call an ambulance, the burning of the police station had zero consequences (which is extra problematic as the big theme of the movie is misplaced anger), Dixon was dumped in the same hospital room as said guy he threw out of a window was placed in, and the whole insane ridiculousness of the "twist" with the alleged rapist at the end, which gets more and more stupid with each second you think about it,) and more that I can't think of. Beyond that, the writing was extraordinarily shitty in places. The contempt this movie has for the region it takes place in is overwhelming. One scene has Mildred's daughter scream "I HOPE I GET RAPED!" and Mildred screams back, "I HOPE YOU GET RAPED TOO!", which... what the fuck? People don't talk like that. And the son kept calling her a cunt repeatedly? This is just superficial edgelordism, not a realistic portrayal of how small town people talk. As someone who actually grew up in a small town in Missouri, this movie was actually insulting. It felt like a rich city dweller's interpretation of what small town hicks are like. Maybe that's why critics liked it so much.

Beyond that there was just sillinness everywhere. I really, really didn't like this movie's attempt at dark humor. It was more tonally jarring and unpleasant than a Marvel movie. It was like if a Tarantino movie had Marvel's sense of humor. The joke about "person-of-color-torturing" early on was incredibly awful and sad. The scene wherethe 19-year-old stumbled upon her boyfriend attacking his ex-wife while his son held a knife to his throat and simply asked if she was intruding... I mean, what the fuck. Is this movie supposed to be serious or not? Beyond that, this is a 19-year-old hooking up with a middle-aged domestic abuser. Why are we supposed to be laughing at her naivete and stupidity when the whole theme of the movie is the rage a mother feels against the horrific sexual violence inflicted on her daughter and where sexual violence is a constant undercurrent? WTF???

This movie was fractally just a complete mess. And yet I didn't really dislike it much as I was watching it. It was entertaining, unpredictable, and most of the performances were good. But wow the rest of it was awful. There's some controversy about its treatment of Dixon and his supposed redemption at the end. Well, I think it's rather obvious he wasn't redeemed and to interpret it that way was to miss the point of the movie. But the movie's treatment of race in general (and sexual violence, and suicide, and pretty much everything else) was very bad, and the fact that people are focusing so much on one small portion of the movie that isn't even problematic and misinterpreting it anyway when there's so much other stuff to criticize is funny and predictable.

Lady Bird - it was okay. Don't know what the big deal was.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

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Well now I'm gonna have to see Billboards sooner than planned; just so I can find out what's under those spoiler tags. That, and when you dislike a movie that much; it tends to mean I'll like it.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

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DA I almost entirely disagree with what you've written here about Three Billboards. I could go point by point with your reading about specific plot points that I disagree with and we could probably debate those for a while, but I'll boil my larger criticisms of your review to the following:

1. I fundamentally don't agree that the movie is trying to provide an accurate view of small towns in Missouri. Of course something that shifts between drama and black humor like this is exaggerated- I'd compare it more to something like Breaking Bad than Tarantino or the MCU. This isn't some neorealism film trying to directly simulate the life of real people in Missouri. I think most of your criticisms here don't have very much weight with this in mind.

2. I think your view of the usage of black comedy in the film is a bit misguided. This movie uses comedy as a way into some of its more troubling themes- for example, the way it uses humor to highlight the ex-husband's girlfriend's naivete I think is very much to make the point that this relationship is fucked up and that its unhealthy as a coping mechanism for the ex-husband and, of course, a bad idea for the girl too. I don't think this is like the MCU where the jokes are about distracting from any troubling or deeper thematic content, I think this particular film uses to get right to those themes. In fact, I would reword your own criticism about the film being the undercurrent of sexual violence being precisely what this relationship between the girl and older man in the film is meant to evoke.

3. I just don't agree with your view that the theme of the film is "misplaced anger". This is about VERY RIGHTFULLY PLACED anger at systemic flaws that none-the-less still spirals out of control and becomes complicated by the humanity of everyone involved.

4. Lastly, I'm not sure what your problem was with the McDormand character telling her daughter that she hopes she gets raped. That isn't edgelordy shit, she was saying something in anger she didn't actually mean or want. A lot of parents do this.

We do agree on Lady Bird though!
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

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Gendo wrote:Well now I'm gonna have to see Billboards sooner than planned; just so I can find out what's under those spoiler tags. That, and when you dislike a movie that much; it tends to mean I'll like it.
+1

This thread has become the place for me to discover movies I know I'll like.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

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Derived Absurdity wrote:Because it was like three hours long and it was the most boring movie I've ever seen, besides maybe The Grudge and Enter the Void.

It was three whole hours of just... nothing. Nothing.
OK, I can get someone finding Boyhood boring, but Enter the Void? That's like an extended acid trip into the afterlife! Man, that's one of my favorite films of this century, if only one a purely aesthetic level since story-wise it's batshit crazy.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

Post by Derived Absurdity »

I'm starting to think that I should probably watch a movie twice before I go into detail on it like that. Sometimes the second time I watch a movie my entire perspective on it changes.

The thing about Three Billboards is I liked it as I was watching it. Just certain things about it annoyed me and made me go, "this is really dumb", but it didn't affect my enjoyment of the movie at all. It's like the inverse of Lady Bird, sort of - I read the praise it got and could appreciate what people were saying about it as I was watching it, but it didn't make me enjoy it any more.

As for your first point, I'm wondering how far the fact that some movies can be seen as "exaggerated" or "heightened" can go to excuse bad storytelling. It seems one can justify a lot of things that would otherwise simply be put down to that by saying it's just heightened realism or stagecraft or something else. How can you tell which one's which without knowing the creator's intentions? People have justified a lot of the silly stuff in Breaking Bad with just that, and in the next sentence they'll describe the show as "gritty". Sorry, how can something be "gritty" and "exaggerated" at the same time when the two are antonyms? Sorry, tangent. But I don't know how one can defend the dropped plotline with the angry dentist this way, for example, simply by saying the movie isn't meant to be read as realistic. There's a difference between heightened exaggerated reality and silly plotlines that make no sense and go nowhere.

You might be right about the humor. I think a problem I had is is that I went into it as a drama first and comedy second when it should probably be the other way around. But for a comedy it wasn't very funny.

I think the anger is misplaced because the movie made it clear that there wasn't a whole lot more the cops could have done.

I might see Enter the Void again. Maybe I wasn't in the right mood the first time.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

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I thought the cops just decided they didn't have enough evidence/wanted to give the lady a break on the dentist thing. Woody told them to let her go as they were carting him off to the hospital, and that's the last we heard about it. The whole burning down the police station was a bigger problem than the dentist thing. Her alibi publicly announces she did it as their date goes south, and aside from a few gasps nobody gives a shit. That didn't really bother me though, because it would have derailed the story, and they had already established the main characters are exempt from justice. Like you said, Sam Rockwell beats the shit out of a guy and nearly kills him by tossing him out a window right in front of the police station and his new chief or sheriff or whatever, and he just gets fired.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

Post by Derived Absurdity »

Good point.

Black Panther - this is a movie by Marvel that just came out this week, in case you haven't heard. If you like Marvel movies it's above average. It's like an above average IHOP or something. They might put extra flavoring in it, but the formula is still the same. For Marvel it deals with some pretty heavy shit, but it's not any more thoughtful or intelligent about its storytelling than it usually is. The villain was good, and the soundtrack was also good albeit scarcely used, but I couldn't really get over how fake and ugly the movie looked in general, and how obvious it was when they were in the mountains or in a field that it was just a green screen. The jokes were limited, which is a plus. There wasn't a whole lot of culture war stuff, which is fine by me. The political implications of the plot might be interesting but I don't think they're worth spending a lot of thought on. All in all it was mildly entertaining but not great or even slightly memorable, which sums up Marvel to a T.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

Post by Raxivace »

I was hoping Black Panther would be good with Ryan Coogler behind it since I liked Fruitvale Station and Creed a lot, though my biggest concern was whether the studio would be dictating a lot of what he could do or not.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

Post by Derived Absurdity »

Interview With a Vampire - lol this movie was goofy as shit. But I was into it. It was a good homoerotic gothic romance thing. It was stupid enough that I thought it was sort of making fun of itself, but this was made before the trend of movies being all ironic about everything, because back then they were secure enough in themselves to play everything completely straight. It was pretty entertaining if you let yourself enjoy it. Tom Cruise was surprisingly awesome.

Little Women - the only reason I watched this is because Winona Ryder and Kirsten Dunst were in it. For a movie in a genre I have almost zero interest in (saccharine family drama), it was okay. I was only rarely bored, which I consider a compliment. I don't know, I don't have much else to say about it.

Super Dark Times - this was actually a pretty good coming-of-age/character drama type thing for a while before it inexplicably turned stupid in the third act and out of nowhere became a lame serial killer thriller. It's about a group of bored high school boys who accidentally do something extremely terrible one day and the emotional fallout that results, which was exceedingly well done... for a while. Since it's about a group of kids in a thriller movie dealing with something traumatic, it's similar to It or Stranger Things, but these guys are lot grosser, more realistic, and more authentic than the kids in those. The correct comparison is to movies like Bully, River's Edge, or Mean Creek, where the common thread is a group of idiot high school and middle schoolers accidentally murder a dude and the rest of the movie is dealing with the consequences. Unfortunately this one is the weakest of all of them.

It started off strong. The atmosphere is unnerving and you get the strong sense that something is really, really off even though nothing comes of it. But after the pivotal scene happens, the movie completely neglects the inner psychology of the primary character (choosing to focus inordinately on his less interesting friend who wasn't even actively responsible for any of it) for (it becomes clear) the sole purpose of establishing suspense. There's not even an attempt by the movie to trace a realistic psychological path for the kid from Point A to Point B, because the movie isn't interested in him as a person, just as a tool to create drama. It was disappointing.

The three movies listed before are vastly better variations on the same theme and I recommend all of them. Bully I consider pretty much a perfect movie. Mean Creek is definitely flawed but good. River's Edge didn't do a whole lot for me but I still appreciated it. All of them are much better than this one.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

Post by BruceSmith78 »

When you said Bully I thought you were talking about this, and I thought you were losing it. Turns out I'd never heard of Bully, or any of those other three movies you just compared.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Derived Absurdity wrote:Interview With a Vampire
Lol Mandela Effect
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

Post by Derived Absurdity »

Not this time! I only found out about this movie a few days ago. I'm just an idiot.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

Post by maz89 »

Eva Yojimbo wrote:
Derived Absurdity wrote:Interview With a Vampire
Lol Mandela Effect
I just googled Mandela Effect to understand the reference. I am now enlightened.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Derived Absurdity wrote:Not this time! I only found out about this movie a few days ago. I'm just an idiot.
Yeah, but you watched it, and presumably read the title on the box/cover, and saw it during the credits, and still got it wrong; same as tons of other people (including myself), for whatever reason. It was actually Interview with a/the Vampire that introduced me to that effect.
maz89 wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote:
Derived Absurdity wrote:Interview With a Vampire
Lol Mandela Effect
I just googled Mandela Effect to understand the reference. I am now enlightened.
It's quite an interesting phenomena. Goes to show how fallible human memory is.

The most fascinating to me is Queen's We Are the Champions. It ends with "we are the champions... of the world," right? Nope, the "of the world" part does not exist at the end. You won't find it on any studio version of the song. The "of the world" part comes at the end of the FIRST chorus and fades out before the second verse starts, but it's not at the end. Everyone remembers it coming at the end though. What's funny is how many people online took to combing through various studio versions and going right to the end and then thinking they're crazy because it's not there. Well, the phrase is there, it's just not where they're looking! [laugh]
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

Post by Gendo »

I think my favorite is The Berenstein Bears.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Gendo wrote:I think my favorite is The Berenstein Bears.
There are a few (including that one) where I can understand how easy it is to make the mistake, since "...stein" is a much more common last name than "...stain."
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

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For the longest time I was absolutely certain that in Jurassic Park that it was Wayne Knight's character that gets eaten while hiding from dinosaurs in the porta-potty. I watched the movie again a few years ago and nope, Wayne Knight dies in a completely different situation and its the lawyer character that gets killed in the porta-potty. Quite a few other people I talked to who hadn't seen the movie in a while thought the same thing for whatever reason. Mandela Effect at work.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

Post by BruceSmith78 »

Bernstein bears fucked with me. I had a bunch of their books and swore it was stein, not stain.

How the fuck could anybdoy forget Newman tried to drive away and ran over a sign and spun it around and then told the dinosaur to fetch and got spit on and mauled to death? I don't get that one.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Raxivace wrote:For the longest time I was absolutely certain that in Jurassic Park that it was Wayne Knight's character that gets eaten while hiding from dinosaurs in the porta-potty. I watched the movie again a few years ago and nope, Wayne Knight dies in a completely different situation and its the lawyer character that gets killed in the porta-potty. Quite a few other people I talked to who hadn't seen the movie in a while thought the same thing for whatever reason. Mandela Effect at work.
I undoubtedly saw JP way too many times to make that mistake.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

Post by Derived Absurdity »

I'm not sure you can beat "Luke, I am your father".
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Derived Absurdity wrote:I'm not sure you can beat "Luke, I am your father".
Like with JP, I saw SW way too much as a kid to get that wrong. At one point I'm pretty sure I had that entire film memorized.
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

Post by maz89 »

Eva Yojimbo wrote: The most fascinating to me is Queen's We Are the Champions. It ends with "we are the champions... of the world," right? Nope, the "of the world" part does not exist at the end. You won't find it on any studio version of the song. The "of the world" part comes at the end of the FIRST chorus and fades out before the second verse starts, but it's not at the end. Everyone remembers it coming at the end though. What's funny is how many people online took to combing through various studio versions and going right to the end and then thinking they're crazy because it's not there. Well, the phrase is there, it's just not where they're looking! [laugh]
Yeah, that's the only one from the lot that really struck me as being odd. I actually did go back and youtube the song's final few seconds to confirm I wasn't being fooled. [biggrin]
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Re: I made a 2018 movies thread too

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Personal Shopper - as Clay said, this movie features Kirsten Stewart at her most Kirsten Stewart, in one of the most Kirsten Stewart movies ever. Everything else about the movie is pretty much irrelevant. Kirsten Stewart is awesome and she basically just walked around and did shit for two hours, being all moody and shit, which was great. The rest of the movie around her didn't make much sense and was probably just okay at best, but that doesn't matter because Kirsten Stewart.

A Ghost Story - this was... different. It was definitely different. I've been wanting to see this one for a while. It's pretty much... I don't know. It has a scene of Rooney Mara sitting on the floor eating a pie which lasted for like ten minutes. Just to give a picture. And yet it was mesmerizing. I don't know. Some parts of this movie worked for me, some parts really didn't. It's basically just a meditation on time and love and the meaning of life and the nature of the universe and stuff. It wasn't thought-provoking to me, but it was... okay, I guess. That's the best I can come up with.
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