Films II : The Filminator

[Maryokutai]

It certainly makes it difficult to watch it on a weekday evening. Maybe someday I'll find the time (Edit: regarding Oppenheimer. New page and all).

 

I picked Certain Women yesterday, an adaptation of three short stories bundled together for a feature film. The stories just barely overlap, like one protagonist running around in the background of another story is the maximum you get. The first one features Laura Dern as a lawyer fighting against certain gender prejudices. Second one is Michelle Williams doing ... something with her family? Third one pits Lily Gladstone against Kristen Stewart in an evening course / student-teacher scenario.

 

I'll admit I didn't get the idea and message behind the second story (Williams) at all. Laura Dern's was okay – one line uttered by her was a bit on the nose but otherwise a decent enough setup. I really liked the third story though. Gladstone can tell entire stories with her eyes, which she's allowed to do here in the role of a character of little words. It's not clear whether she falls for Stewart's character or is entranced by the active and exciting lifestyle of hers. But the way it all develops hit very close to home, and I think everyone who's ever been in a one-sided relationship or is/was frustrated by the mundanity of their life can relate. I found one scene in particular extremely hard to watch.

 

It's difficult to give this a verdict considering I really liked one part and didn't like another. But overall I left it with a positive impression, even though I'm in no rush to watch it a second time.

[Maf]

Watched John Wick 4 this afternoon. I’ve always liked these movies but think they are overrated. This is probably my favourite one and is the closest I’ve had the fun that other people have talked about having with these films.

 

The actions scenes are great, I love the stages and sets they have for this film. I remembered thinking about that in JW3 as well but I think it was better here. It’s the most luxurious, glamorous, beautifully made, stylish James Bond style sets that then have the most video game-ass video game head popping action I’ve seen just fucking ‘em up.
 

It’s such a brilliant mix. In the last action sequence there’s even a Hotline Miami style twin stick shooter bit where the camera is Birds Eye view as John moves from room to room blowing people away with a shotgun that has incendiary ammo. 

 

It’s hard not to think of video games while watching the film and two things spring to mind. Firstly that it’s been such a long time since video games have evolved cinematic action. I can’t recall the last time I felt like video games made a massive leap with this idea. Secondly video games need more gorgeous levels like this film has stages. I want more water, more neon, more reflective surfaces, just more cool shit to blast apart. 
 

My only 2 negatives with the film is I didn’t really understand Mr Nobody’s part in the story and the last action sequence was too much. Especially the bit with the stairs. The film is nearly two and half hours long and there wasn’t enough creative stuff happening in that fight that justified the extra 20 minutes. It’s one thing that makes me think I would never watch the film again is it’s just too long.

 

But overall really liked it. 
 

My other video game thought is if they ever do another Doom movie they should get this film making team to do it. 

[Nag]

Congratulations on actually finishing something.👍

[one-armed dwarf]

There's a certain section in Cyberpunk which feels like a direct callout to John Wick. Nag might know the bit I'm mentioning

[Nag]

I spent that long with the game over a drawn out time frame that I'm drawing a blank on that... plus the whole game can sort of feel that way depending how you play it.

[Maf]

1 hour ago, Nag said:

Congratulations on actually finishing something.👍

Well I’m currently on day 3 of saying fuck everybody and refusing to get out of bed. Not going to work, not going to the gym, not answering the phone, not doing shit

 

So I was getting bored and needed something to do]

Next is either TMNT or Spider-Verse 2. Just waiting for a headache to clear then deciding. 
 

Also what happened to movies streaming for free on Prime? Now everything is to buy or rent? Boo that shit 

[Maryokutai]

Clouds of Sils Maria, a story about an older actress who receives an opportunity to star as the deuteragonist in a reimagining of a theater piece that launched her career 20 years prior, where she played the younger protagonist.

 

It's an extremely complex movie that tackles a lot of themes and ideas, but I lack both the knowledge and the intellect to really dissect this. It's very layered though, so on surface level I found myself really enjoying the back and forth between Maria, the actress, and Valentine, her personal assistant as they navigate the pros and cons about whether or not Maria should return to the play. There's some sort of three-step meta-narrative during the segments in which they go through the lines of the play, where you're not always sure if it's the characters acting, the characters saying what they think or even the life of their actors coming through. There's very strong chemistry between Juliette Binoche (Maria) and Kristen Stewart (Val) and I can absolutely see why the latter won a César for this role.

 

Really enjoyed this – there's a very ambiguous moment towards the end that I found unsettling, but in a good way, if that makes sense. Also some rather impressive landscape vistas to look at, as a lot of outdoor scenes have been filmed in the Alps.

 

And that concludes my little Stewart marathon. There's a few more on my list but they'll have to wait a bit. But she's made some really interesting choices and out of the six movies I watched no two were alike, with this one and Spencer being my favourites.

[one-armed dwarf]

Well that's unfortunate cause I was hoping someone would go see Alex Garland's Civil War and report back on the fuss about it.

 

fwiw, looking up that film the other actress Juliette Binoche was in a film called Blue, which I watched ages back and found pretty good. 

 

I watched High and Low (1963) the other night. This is one of Kurosawa's films that aren't about samurai, with Mifune playing a high ranking executive at a shoe company on the brink of making some aggressive moves until his chaffeur's kid is kidnapped and he's got to decide whether or not to put his overly leveraged position on the line

 

It's a good film, but I have this issue with Kurosawa where I find his films a bit too straightforward or something so I often don't feel I'm getting as much with his films as others do. I mainly watched it cause Spike Lee is remaking it with Denzel, and so I figured it was a good time to check it out. I'll say at least that the theatrical framing it uses for the first part of the film, where it feels like a stageplay, and then later on it goes into more of a police procedural with a more active camera following a character down through the streets, it drifts between these two modes very effectively. It feels like you spend an enormous amount of time in the movie completely separated from the reality of the world it's set in, ensconced within this shoe guy's house, to then being thrown out and immersed completely within the city when it follows the police investigation (which I guess, there's the theme of the film for you in a way). Particularly in the scenes in the nightclub

[Maryokutai]

I'm completely unfamiliar with her work but it was funny to scroll over her films and find Godzilla and Ghost in the Shell among tons of highly praised French movies.

 

I don't quite understand the connection to Civil War though, unless that comment was aimed at someone/something else.

[one-armed dwarf]

I thought Kirsten Stewart was in it but it was Kirsten Dunst, doh.

[shinymcshine]

Really liked some of Alex Garland's recent stuff - Ex Machina and Annihilation were great, the TV series Devs was fantastic, albeit Men was pretty so so.

[Maf]

I got 30mins in to TMNT Mutant Mayhem today and it's not very good. 

 

The film has basically one good joke and that's where all the Turtles talk over each other. My understanding is all that stuff is improv and it sort of shows and is very funny. But they repeat it like 5 times in the first 30mins and it's like Ok, I get it. 

 

The art style is very Borderlands cel shaded kind of thing. It even has all the sketch lines on the characters and stuff. It then seems like they looked to Spider-Verse for colouring and mixed these together. It's all right. It looks good, and I'm always in favour of anything that doesn't look like Pixar. But it doesn't stand out enough from video games I've played tbh

 

Not that it's really important but I hate the story. I get the original story is stupid (But it was meant to be, TMNT is one of those things where they came up with the a basic Turtle design and the name as a joke but it happened to blow up) 

 

But in this version Splinter is agoraphobic, they all learned their Ninja skills from watching YT videos and the fight I saw is them clumsily falling over and happening to win. 

 

I don't know. It's not horrible, but it is boring. And it cost me £7.99 fuck movies, man  😐

[Jimboxy]

On 16/04/2024 at 13:43, Maf said:

I got 30mins in to TMNT Mutant Mayhem today and it's not very good

I'd stick with it dude. I'm on no way a Turtles guy, but I really enjoyed what they did with the characters. I think the first battle you're talking about is kind of the point in that battle. They've never actually applied these learned skills in anger before and win by educated luck and not just pure luck.

[mfnick]

Yea I remember it being a very slow and boring start but it really came into its own as it went on. I loved it by the end. 

[Maryokutai]

Into the Wild. Took me a while. I remember my mum raving about the book, then going on about the movie when it came out, and people telling me to watch it because I really like Life is Strange (the second one took some massive influences from it). But for some reason I just never got around.

 

I find it difficult to write about this because a lot of things I either like or dislike about the movie are basically my perception of the ideological reasons of what transpired in reality, and not really about the movie itself. For simplicity's sake let's just say that I enjoyed watching it because it perfectly captures the overall (off)road-trip atmosphere, but the more that I think about it, the more negatives keep coming to the surface. The narration from the sister, for example, has a tendency to portray Chris as an enlightened, heroic figure, but he was simply a free-spirited egoist. Supposedly his father was a significantly more awful person than how he's portrayed in the movie, which would to some extent explain why he didn't reach out, but I found this one-sided approach to storytelling a tad misleading. That's not to say I disagree with the overall concept and idea of just wishing it all away, and there are some exemplary scenes that portray just how needlessly complicated and bureaucratic human life has become (i.e. the kayak thing), and I'm no stranger to the eye-rolling, almost revolting moments that it can produce. But I think what I want to say is that the film lacks nuance. Chris himself is also portrayed as not quite as interesting as he possibly was? Everyone around him immediately falls in love with him, but he never had that kind of presence in the movie IMO.

 

There are some really, really interesting locales (Slab City) and scenes here though. I rented this via VOD, but I think I'll pick up the BluRay at some point because I imagine the behind the scenes stuff and commentary being absolutely wild (no pun intended).

[shinymcshine]

Whoa whoa whoa - let's backtrack a bit on that one....

 

....doesn't that film also feature Kristen Stewart......!?!?

[Maryokutai]

Yes! That was a bit of funny moment when that scene happened, because I actually wasn't aware. When I looked up her stuff I focused on post-Twilight movies and she made this just before those. Rather small role though (but not unimportant).

 

But that definitely explains why the movie popped up in my bubble recently. Freaky algorithms. 

[DANGERMAN]

On 17/04/2024 at 17:38, Jimboxy said:

I'd stick with it dude. I'm on no way a Turtles guy, but I really enjoyed what they did with the characters. I think the first battle you're talking about is kind of the point in that battle. They've never actually applied these learned skills in anger before and win by educated luck and not just pure luck.

I enjoyed it too. Raph isn't especially well written, but he's the worst anyway so who cares 

[one-armed dwarf]

Synecdoche, New York (2008) Starring the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, it's about a tortured playwright trying to make his masterpiece. While watching I figured that it must be by the Being John Malkovich guy and it sure is except he only wrote that film whereas this one he directed and wrote. It has that sort of 'mindspace' thing going on where time is very subjective and seems to collapse inwards. 

 

There's great moments and it's conceptually very cool in how it constructs its narrative but it's very fatiguing. The subject matter was like being shoved into a mid life existentialist crisis and pressing the fast forward button but also the rewind button at the same time. Which is sorta the point I think. This was a double bill with something else I watched and it's a shame I didn't pick something a bit more life affirming to watch after it, lol. 

 

Good film but leaves you in a funk

[Maryokutai]

Watched that feelgood movie dwarf mentioned a while ago, Zone of Interest. 

 

I think he put it rather well. Saying the movie was an uncomfortable watch is the understatement of the century, but it being this very passive, but not subtle, take on whatever name you want to give the horrors that happened during that time made this a more interesting prospect than your usual Hollywood-ish dramatisation of the subject. I do think it was too long for its own good, but it set out what it wanted to in a disturbingly effective manner IMO. There's also a lot of thought put into how certain things are worded – there's one very poignant scene that is impossible to properly translate because a German word they used ('Opfer') is very imprecise without context and they string a sentence around it that made me pause the movie for a good minute.

 

Speaking of the language aspect, I found it a bit annoying that the subtitles seem to be baked into the video feed so you can't turn them off (at least in every version I could find). Bit of an odd choice, particularly for a movie like this.

 

So yeah, good for what it wants to be. Will I ever watch it again? No chance in hell.