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Talk About Movies: Part 4 Talk About Movies: Part 4

11-03-2018 , 08:22 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Clovis8
Err my pony is dumb. I was thinking of the doc not narrative film. Lol
The difference is, your pony was dumb this one time. As correctly pointed out by you, mine is slow all the time, just got lucky this once.

Been thinking it over during the day, still not sure what to think. I think I'm looking forward to it.

Speaking of Hanks, The Post came on HBO last week. Hanks & Streep (and Bob Odenkirk, who I really like), how bad could it be?

I wouldn't say bad, but at the same time, it certainly didn't captivate me. Kinda made it to the end nonplussed. Jason Robards as Bradlee FTW.
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11-03-2018 , 08:23 PM
That’s nice, John.
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11-03-2018 , 08:26 PM
I realize The Post ain’t All The President’s Men, but it’s a well-told story in a time that it’s needed. So I like it.
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11-03-2018 , 08:56 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dominic
I realize The Post ain’t All The President’s Men, but it’s a well-told story in a time that it’s needed. So I like it.
I'm very much a "movies for entertainment" viewer. I just don't have any background in how to watch a movie critically. Thus, a lot of people here get a lot more out of a movie than do I, and also want different things from a movie.

That's one of the reasons I enjoy this thread, people in here sometimes give depth to their comments about noticing something I would've completely missed, or how the thing in the first part of the movie was really important in that last part, or how a character developed over the course of the story.

So, thank you all for the continuing education.
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11-03-2018 , 10:10 PM
BTW, Welles's cinematographer on The Other Side of the Wind also shot One Million AC/DC.
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11-04-2018 , 01:11 AM
Because of certain recent geopolitical events I re-watched Fail-Safe 1964 on cable TV. It was still terrific. It's in black and white with minimal special effects and great acting and lighting. The scene where the atomic bomber pilot's wife frantically tries to tell him over the phone that it is all a mistake was especially gripping. Still grade A .




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11-04-2018 , 01:32 AM
Yeah, Fail Safe is amazing
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11-04-2018 , 05:36 AM
Am I missing some good Tom Hanks movies? I think the last movie of his that I really loved as Catch Me if You Can.

I saw Captain Phillips which was ok, and Cloud Atlas which was pretty meh. That's about it in the last 10 years.
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11-04-2018 , 06:44 AM
You couldn't pay me enough to sit thru The Post! Talk about superfluous.
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11-04-2018 , 06:50 AM
Atomic Blonde - delightful fun. Theron is such a fantastically magnetic badass. Managed to set aside my general disdain for McAvoy for most of it. Leitch may well manage to get me to break my no-Fast-Furious rule for his spinoff. Probably not, but it's at least possible now.
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11-04-2018 , 07:18 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dominic
I realize The Post ain’t All The President’s Men, but it’s a well-told story in a time that it’s needed. So I like it.
We definitely do not need a hagiography of a mainstream corporate newspaper and the 1%'er who owned it. Looking forward to The Post 2: WaPo Helps Sell the Iraq War tho.

(I still like the movie.)
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11-04-2018 , 11:32 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Baltimore Jones
We definitely do not need a hagiography of a mainstream corporate newspaper and the 1%'er who owned it.
Actually, we need many more of them. Newspapers aren't (weren't) perfect but they were all we had when the Devil turned 'round on us.
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11-04-2018 , 12:34 PM
Border

Liquor: Three of four bottles, sniff sniff.

Long John Silver: Smuggled into assisted living.

Trigger Warning: Dirty fingernails.

Shame, Guilt, Rage: I smelled it on him, sniff sniff.

Friends: Moose und Fox.

Now we're eating maggots: Be discreet.

Fridge: Sometimes you need your privacy.

They must suffer: as we have suffered.

It came parcel post: Look at that Carnation Baby!

Spoiler:
At first I thought it was about Neanderthals, but it turned out to be about Trolls. As an allegory, it is either very heavy-handed, light as a feather, or not an allegory at all.

Trigger Warning:
Spoiler:
Graphic Troll sex.


Very interesting movie in the Gloomy Scandinavian Tradition. Alludes to baby porn. By all means check it out.
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11-04-2018 , 12:59 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Phat Mack
Actually, we need many more of them. Newspapers aren't (weren't) perfect but they were all we had when the Devil turned 'round on us.
Exactly. Besides, Streep and Hanks are wonderful. And who is watching now?
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11-04-2018 , 03:59 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bluegrassplayer
Am I missing some good Tom Hanks movies? I think the last movie of his that I really loved as Catch Me if You Can.

I saw Captain Phillips which was ok, and Cloud Atlas which was pretty meh. That's about it in the last 10 years.
Charlie Wilson's War
Toy Story 3
Music video for Carly Rae Jepsen's "I Really Like You"
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11-04-2018 , 04:00 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by John Cole
Exactly. Besides, Streep and Hanks are wonderful. And who is watching now?
And who is watching who is watching?
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11-04-2018 , 05:01 PM
Amazing, but Excalibur still manages to get better every time I watch it

Dom, did you ever find out anything more about that unreleased documentary?
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11-04-2018 , 05:22 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by BustoRhymes
Amazing, but Excalibur still manages to get better every time I watch it

Dom, did you ever find out anything more about that unreleased documentary?
never did find it, nope
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11-04-2018 , 07:15 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dominic
Bohemian Rhapsody, Bryan Singer, 2018

This is really two movies, not one. The first movie is a by-the-numbers bio-pic that checks all the boxes: parental disapproval, band estrangements, awakening sexuality, evil hangers-on trying to break up the band, excess drugs and promiscuousness, and a final, noble battle with a deadly disease.

None of which is all that interesting, to be honest. It's all just the in-between parts while we wait for the music.

One thing that pissed me off was that they played fast and loose with the timeline and when Queen music came out. The first song we see Freddie Mercury play with the other boys in a run-down club is "Keep Yourself Alive."

Really? One of their biggest hits is the very first song Freddie plays with the other band members?

But okay, I can handle a little narrative license. But that's not all. We hear music from Jazz before A Night of the Opera Comes out. We hear "Crazy Little Thing called Love" before a scene of them working on "We Will Rock You."

Speaking of the latter song, we see words flash across the scene that says 1980 and then we see the band working on "We Will rock You."

What? That song's from News Of The World in 1977. The Game came out in 1980.

We do see John Deacon introducing the band to the famous bass line of "Another One Bites The Dust," which is cool, but man, the messed up timeline is annoying. And I'm not even a huge Queen fan, so if it bothers me, I can't imagine what it might do to Queen fanatics.

On to the second movie, which is awesome:

When the film sticks with Queen making music, writing songs, playing with different genres of music, confusing record executives, and - then - playing live shoes - Bohemian Rhapsody soars.

Rami Malek is astonishing as Freddie Mercury. By the end of the movie, he is Freddie, and I forgot what the real Mercury looked like! Brian May, Roger Taylor, and John Deacon are played by their twins, Gwilym Lee, Ben Hardy, and Joseph Mazzello. They are incredible. But just like in the real Queen, they naturally take a back seat to Freddie (Malek).

When they play Rio and break the record for biggest paid concert ever, we are there. When they play Bohemian Rhapsody for the first time in concert, it's electrifying.

But Singer holds his cards to his vest for most of the movie, until the end: the famous Queen performance at Live Aid, before 100,000 screaming fans at Wembley and two billion people around the world.

There's an old adage in film and theater: leave them with a WOW and the audience won't care what came before.

Well, Singer gives a wow times ten. We see the entirety of Queen's Live Aid performance, performed by this fake band. At Wembley. In front of 100,000 people.

I'm sure the crowd was a lot of CGI, but damn if it didn't look like they were there.

Singer begins the concert with a bird's eye view of the stadium, many hundreds of feet above, and SWOOPS down into Wembley, over and through the audience, onto the stage while the band comes on, and finishes with a close-up of Freddie's face as he sits at the piano and begins playing "Rhapsody." All in one shot. It is bravura filmmaking.

And Malek just owns Mercury during this, especially the Radio Ga-Ga bit where the entire crowd is doing the music video hand-claps in unison, and when he does his "note heard 'round the world " a cappella.

It's one helluva way to end a movie.
20 minutes of Queen in concert.
Very wise.

So, two movies. The first one gets a C-. The second one gets an A.

Guess that makes it a B-!

*******

One thing the movie did was reaffirm what an amazing, unique talent Mercury was.
I pretty much agree with most of this. It’s a pretty bad movie with the exception of the final 15 minutes, which are great.

I didn’t really care about the timeline stuff. I’m not a big fan. I still think thier music is pretty vacuous and terrible. They were rock in the vain of Brittney Spears which makes thier jab at Madonna pretty ironic.
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11-04-2018 , 07:58 PM
A long overdue superhero post.

The Dark Knight came back to IMAX for the 10 year anniversary. This was something that I'd hoped might happen back in '08-'09, so I had to go see it despite my newer disdain for Nolan and my updated reading on the film (which I hadn't rewatched since early '09, IMAX).

It's fairly ok as a piece of entertainment. From Joker getting captured up until about the ferries is particularly strong. The ferries really stop the momentum cold though, it's a bad sequence.

Politically, as I've already discussed here in the last couple of years, the movie is trash. It's fascist. I'd read a convincing take recently that Nolan is showing us fascism in order to prove that it's bad blah blah blah, but nope. That's not there in the movie itself. I don't know the Nolan Bros. politics, but if they think they're on the left then they're pretty stupid (they may well be right wingers).

A natural response from people who like this [type of] movie is "lol who cares bro, it's Batman and the Joker, just enjoy it, who is going to these movies for political messages?" But then those same people will say that Nolan is literally one of the greatest filmmakers ever both because he's entertaining and because of how smart his films are, with deeper meanings about life and politics. (That's a contradiction, in other words.)

If you're not in the latter group, you still cannot deny that Nolan has intentionally put politics into the film and WANTS you to think about them. There's clear 9-11/Ground Zero allusions, there's torture, there's extradition, there's domestic spying. Come on. If you are the type who doesn't think films are worth thinking about in this way, what the **** are you doing posting here?

If I need to go more into depth on this later I will, but there's already plenty written about it. (Search internet for 'Dark Knight Nolan fascist' or whatever.)

I'd ultimately give the movie a thumb down. I don't really mind if you love it, but if you do actually think it's smart and/or has good politics then you're not particularly bright.

I unironically believe that Batman Forever is a better movie (have also seen this in theater in last few years). Batman is such an obvious trash character (beating up on street criminals when the actual root cause of them being criminals is that he's a ****ing billionaire) that you either need to treat it as pulp/camp like the Burton-verse, or you need major changes to the character such as portraying him as evil/non-heroic (or he starts questioning his own billionaire status and commits suicide).

(The Nolan movies portray him as heroic, for the record.)

Longer than I expected, so part 2 on superheros will have to wait!
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11-04-2018 , 08:03 PM
Nice, Baltimore Jones.
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11-04-2018 , 08:28 PM
That's a terrible review of The Dark Night. I enjoyed it greatly when it came out, and I don't honestly remember politics in it at all. But I sure see politics in your review. I'm guessing you're the type who sees politics in everything, and you can't enjoy anything that you somehow find wrong politically. It was a great movie, and I'm not some Nolan fanboy; all I have seen by him are his Batman adaptations and Interstellar. The other 3 movies I've seen by him were fun and held my attention but weren't great. The Dark Night was great entertainment. Of course Heath Ledger's performance was the best part of the film. I don't really care if it's "smart". It's certainly not as stupid as the rampaging dinosaur and face-swapping spy movies many on this forum rave about.
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11-04-2018 , 08:38 PM
Baltimore,

Good post.

Did you feel the politics portrayed in TDK evolved into something else or more of the same in The Dark Knight Rises?

I agree that the politics are a huge part of the movie. The guy literally integrated an Occupy segment into TDKR LOL. That's deliberate on Nolan's part and fair for analysis.
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11-04-2018 , 09:08 PM
Just got back from Bohemian Rhapsody. Wonderful movie. Just fantastic.

I don't care - and I doubt most people will care - about some of the timeline stuff. It's all woven together so well and the story is great. Pretty good soundtrack, too.

About the Live Aid concert:

Spoiler:
Saw an interview with the cast in the few minutes between movies on HBO and they said they tried to mimic every movement, every step of the concert exactly.


And the most fun part of the movie aside from the music:

Spoiler:
Mike Myers making the Wayne's World inside joke.
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11-04-2018 , 09:15 PM
PSA: A lot of Criterion collection movies are 50% on BarnesandNoble.com (and presumably in the stores as well though I just bought mine online)
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