What MOVIE(s) have you been....seeing? watching?

I liked 4L way more than Ancient, but those are all valid criticisms in my book.
City of Stars is good and all, I even put it in my playlist... but deleted it quite soon, because Emma Stone laughter is cute exactly just once, and then gets very annoying.
The Riddle of the Model and Drive it Like you Stole It are so much better and long-lasting, imho, than anything in LLLL.

I watched Nice Guys the other night. It is pretty uneven but very funny. Gosling is awesome, because he's funny and unpretentious. I think I never had so much fun with him as in that movie.

La La Land is second equal with Desolation of Smaug as the worst (non children's) movies I have seen in the last 5 years (Warcraft is by far the biggest stinker I have seen in a cinema in that time frame). It is funny you mentioned West Side Story as that is another highly rated musical I don't like. When I look at the ones I like, most have a strong comedic element, and the others tend to have the protagonist finding joy in their music, so there is a real sense of fun in all the ones I like. But then the opening number of La La Land was supposed to be capture that sense of fun and I found it really dull. The only musical bits I liked were the dance on the roadway and the rock concert.

Edit: I think that I demand my musicals have a catchy up tempo number, as the best song from ones I like all is that (Shake a Tailfeather, Time Warp, Drive it Like You Stole It, Footloose, Try a Little Tenderness, Make 'em Laugh, etc) whereas when you look at the musicals I don't like, their best song is slow and ponderous (Send in the Clowns, Somewhere, City of Stars). What is the point of being a musical if you can't express joy in music?

Wtf is going on, I saw Hidden Figures last night and my buddy Nick liked it way more than Ls La Land. I thought Hidden Figures was great but come on

I have bumped into two other people today who also didn't like La La Land and the repeated comments from those who don't like it are that the songs are dull and the dancing lacks energy.

I don't have anything productive to say about La La Land, because I find musicals to be really weird. I appreciate singing and acting as much as anybody, but when somebody is acting and suddenly breaks into song, it's just weird to me.

But I do want to comment on Emma Stone. I've seen her in a few movies, and she is a fine actress who has undeniable chemistry with Ryan Gosling. But about half the time she looks gorgeous, and the other half the time she looks kind of like a bulldog, a bit jowly and with a fat face. I can't figure it out. Maybe she looks better from some angles than others, or it's a matter of lighting and make-up. Or maybe she is a bulimic, and the vomiting triggers facial bloating (this is an actual thing for bulimics). I hope it isn't the bulimia, though she would hardly be the only woman in Hollywood struggling with it. They say that the camera adds ten pounds, and our youth-obsessed society requires slender women for lead roles.

When you out her beside Kristen Stewart it's easier to figure out

Don't get me started on Emma Stone.
The huge goggle eyes.
The ever so slight lisp.
Not to mention her middle toe is longer than her second toe.

Shellhead wrote: I don't have anything productive to say about La La Land, because I find musicals to be really weird. I appreciate singing and acting as much as anybody, but when somebody is acting and suddenly breaks into song, it's just weird to me.

This is one of the main reasons I don't like most musicals. At all. They almost always feel like the plot is only there to tie the songs together as some kind of weird misguided musical showcase. And the songs are often blatant exposition that could have been handled just as well (or better) by decent writing.

My wife likes song and dance though, and she really likes musicals. So maybe I'm just a curmudgeon.

MacDirk Diggler wrote: Not to mention her middle toe is longer than her second toe.

That's probably what that final frame of Ryan Gosling going back to his piano was all about. He's thinking: "I shouldn't have let her go... On the other hand, that middle toe... fuck it, I can do better."

Ancient_of_MuMu wrote: The Court Jester

...yay, verily, yay!

Ancient_of_MuMu wrote: La La Land is second equal with Desolation of Smaug as the worst (non children's) movies I have seen in the last 5 years (Warcraft is by far the biggest stinker I have seen in a cinema in that time frame).

I can appreciate that you have a different opinion, but seriously, this is just trolling.

Of the "musicals" you listed as liking, I think only half of them even qualify as musicals. There's a difference between a musical and a movie that has songs in it.

Wow, that seems interesting. Lay that out for me, Ancient of MuMu. I think I get what you're saying, but I want clarity.

• DARK CITY -- Not a musical, but Jennifer Connelly sings Sway and it was awesome.
• THE HUDSUCKER PROXY -- Not a musical, but Vic Tenetta delivers with Memories Are Made Of This.
• BLUES BROTHERS -- Musical, because of Think and Shake Your Tail Feather, thought not because of Gimme Some Lovin' or even Minnie The Moocher.

If the songs are diegetic, even if folks sing along, not a musical. But bursting into song, where that is Just Not Done, especially with choreography: musical.

Watched a couple of movies set in Brooklyn this weekend, both checked out from the public library. The second one has a dramatic finale on Super Bowl Sunday, which was funny because I watched it instead of the Super Bowl.

Don Jon: I vaguely knew what this movie was out thanks to a lengthy trailer years ago, and with trepidation, decided to give it a shot. Joseph-Gordon Leavitt always struck me as a cool guy with a mook face. So he turned out to be ideal casting for this role, as a shallow, basic dude-bro who nails a different chick every weekend and beats off to lots of online porn. Turns out that Don Jon is a pretty good anti-romcom, faking out the viewers to see the relationship with Scarlett Johansson's character as a typical romcom redemption story arc. But ScarJo's character gave me a bad vibe, pretty but very shallow, and more than a little controlling. Even so, I was caught off guard when the story jumped the tracks and went off on an interesting tangent. Julianne Moore was great, so warm and empathetic and kooky. Kind of like a manic pixie dream girl who grew into a real person. I wish the movie had gone one step farther in an early scene and done a full and subversive takedown of the romcom conventions, by identifying the romcom as the female equivalent of porn. Tony Danza also appears, playing a very solid aging Tony Danza.

The Drop: Like Jennifer Lawrence, Tom Hardy is someone I would struggle to pick in a police line-up. There is something forgettable about his appearance that allows him to disappear into whatever role he plays. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it left him unable to completely overcome the weakness of the script for The Drop. Co-stars Noomi Rapace and James Gandolfini tended to steal the scenes. Then again, Hardy's character is intended to be low-key, until a critical scene late in the movie. The Drop is a crime story, focused on the idea that nightly organized crime revenue for a local mob gets dropped at a particular bar each, rotating unpredictably through a variety of bars owned by that mob. Hardy plays a bartender at the bar that gets designated as the drop for Super Bowl Sunday. Throughout the movie, he plays a nice guy who seems on the verge of having his life ruined. Then there is a moment of surprising revelation, and everything is different after that twist. The Drop isn't a great movie, but it's an okay one and the twist makes it worthwhile.

I had that one-month cold that becomes a four-day flu and then goes back to being a one-month cold bullshit that has been going around this winter, and while I was holed up at home I got the chance to watch some movies and TV.

Holy shit, The Happening is so godawful that it defies imagination. Mark Wahlberg's acting, the incredibly poorly conceived and developed "fragile, damaged" character played by Zooey Deschanel, having people running away from the wind... it was just a smorgasbord of shit. I do admit that there's an interesting nugget of an idea for an eco-horror movie in there somewhere, but it's handled really badly. I hadn't seen this movie until now, and missed The Village and Lady in the Water, so for me the M. Night train went from really groovy (Sixth Sense and Unbreakable... even Signs) straight to "this guy doesn't get to put his name above the movie title anymore," and I had always wondered how low he really must have sunk and how fair that actually was. The answer is damn low, and yes he deserved it.

I didn't enjoy Batman v. Superman when I saw it in the theater, but it felt like a movie that I might like more upon second viewing. Nope! It was worse. I tried to give it a chance but half an hour into it and I was full-on hate-watching it. Jeez, that scene where Superman busts up Batman's attempt to raid Luthor's kryptonite shipment is SO BAD. "The Bat is dead. Bury it. Consider this a mercy." "Do you bleed? You will." Holy fuck, even a 13 year old boy would laugh at that wannabe edgy dialog. And this is Superman and Batman! Even if it were, I don't know, Dr. Manhattan and Rorschach it would be over the top and out of character. But Superman and Batman?

And then I watched Captain America: Civil War and all was well. I noticed a couple of convenient misunderstandings that furthered the plot, which were less obvious to me the first time I watched the movie, and the final act has some really wonky timing issues (how exactly did Iron Man sit by Rhodey's side at the hospital in Germany until there was a prognosis, then visit the Raft (middle of the Atlantic, I imagine) to find out where Captain America and the Winter Soldier were headed, then still arrive in Siberia at the same time they did?), but I do feel like the filmmakers pulled off a bit of a miracle here. They took what was already a big roster of characters, added to it, and yet gave satisfying character moments and, in some cases, arcs while telling a self-contained tale, advancing the overall Marvel Cinematic Universe meta-plot, and adapting a beloved comics storyline. I can quibble about little things here and there, but ultimately I can't even imagine how difficult that must have been for them to pull off. And the villain was memorable and competent! AND... the finale didn't involve a giant laserbeam shooting into the sky and hundreds or thousands of CGI enemies to battle. I'm getting a bit tired of superhero movies in general, but the Captain America movies have been wonderful.

i like you

Going from Signs straight to Happening is like giving up heroin cold turkey. Most of us slowly got used to the turd sandwich of a director that M. Night turned into with a first slight taste of p00p of The Village. Not enough to throw up, but something is wrong.... then Lady in the Water that was really started to test our patience (I still liked it, even though it's bad). So when I saw The Happening next i was sort of getting ready for it to be worse, and OH MAN was it worse. I am just thankful that I saw THE HAPPENING before I saw THE LAST AIRBENDER cuz I might have had a stroke being exposed to that straight up. LAST AIRBENDER was even worse than that horrific Lindsay Lohan torture pr0n movie where her fingers get cut off. OMG it's actually worse than that.

I was gritting my teeth when you started talking about BvS cuz I was worried you might have had a change of heart. Good for you, man. That is also another form of diarrhea of the screen.