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

uh oh, you're going to have a small problem with Last Jedi then

Slumdog Millionaire does not hold up, no. Not quite as bad as Crash but...

Yeah I tried rewatched Slumdog last week and couldn’t get through it. I feel too bad for those kids

Crash still hits me like a freight train when that girl runs to her dad to protect him. I think it is tied for the most I cried in a movie.

I didn't like Slumdog when I first saw it all those years ago. I was shocked it won the Oscar. But, you know, Hollywood politics bullshit.

I watched Bright, the Netflix original, last night and it was quite enjoyable. I am hoping they continue to dive more into this universe they have created. I have a nagging thought that the Dark Lord that is spoken of in the movie will be a let down upon reveal. But that is a concern for the next movie, I suppose.

Gregarius wrote: I didn't like Slumdog when I first saw it all those years ago. I was shocked it won the Oscar. But, you know, Hollywood politics bullshit.

The nominations might have some politics bullshit but the voting doesn’t.

Again, if anything proves why the Academy is so much better than Golden Globes or anything else it’s really Hurt Locker winning over Avatar. Because of how voting works, there’s no way Avatar should lose there but it still did. I was so proud of the Academy for actually voting for the Best Picture there.

Had fun watching the new Jumanji. Changing it to a video game worked a lot better than I thought it would.

I watched Bright too and found it pretty entertaining. It is about the most basic buddy cop script you can imagine but with orcs and elves. It reminds me of Alien Nation in that regard. It’s really kind of stupid, but is watchable and reasonably fun. Very underdeveloped though- I would really like to see Del Toro do something with this concept rather than David “Suicide Squad” Ayer. It really feels like it should have been a series but Netflix may have not wanted to go all in on such a goofy concept.

Will Smith is pretty good in it- a little more depth than his usual aw hell nah schtick.

I watched The Room for the first time, followed by The Disaster Artist.

The Room is...an interesting watch. The multiple, very long sex scenes with the terrible love songs playing over them are so cringe-inducing. This movie is something.

I really enjoyed The Disaster Artist as well. The pure insanity of Tommy Wiseau is just crazy.

JUst got back from The Darkest Hour. Gary Oldman is insanely good in this, he will win for sure. The movie is a blast too.

The Disaster Artist is the funniest movie I've seen this year, but I'm saying that not having seen The Darkest Hour yet.

I can recommend "Dark" on Netflix, its a german language time travelling drama that just aired its first season of 10 episodes.
Oh, and Black Mirror season 4 airs in a few days too

Saw Guardians of the Galaxy.

It was fun, but I'm not sure I'll remember much of it. I liked the fact that the characters are kind of terrible people but there was not much to munch over beyond that. It's gone of those "take 2 hours of detours to go from point A to point B" movies and the villain is such a clear D-lister that he's not worth mentioning. It's also too long and with too many moving parts, you could have told the same story in much less time and trimmed down the final bsttle by quite a lot. MCU films tend to have these big aerial battle scenes but none of them are actually that great. Same problem as the fist fights: Lack of physical space, too many things on the screen, too much blur.

I'm watching most Marvel films because my GF likes them and it's fun to watch them together. She also wants to improve her English skills so watching them in English with English subtitles helps. This one was harder on her, characters speak very fast all the time, so it was harder to parse than most Marvel movies, which are on the easier side.
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On my pet peeve, this movie is a good example of it. Setting aside the Smurfette principle, the "favourite daughter" angle and all other similar issues of the original material, my issue is with the ravagers and the prison scene.

Consider this: They wanted to put Gamora on the same prison as the rest of the cast, but she's a woman so on the first, establishing shots they added some female extras to convey the prison is not sex-segregated.

However, these extras compeltely dissapear after Gamora goes to her cell. For the rest of the scenes the prison is 100% male and all the minor prisoner characters are male. All the mooks being hit and going crazy around the prison? All male. There are no women, they have dissapeared. Same with the Ravagers. No women at all. They thought adding women was importating enough to put them into the establishing shots, but not afterwards.

Same with the Nova Corps, by the way. They add the powerful woman leader then make all the rank and file Corps male.

Heres the thing: If they made every single ravager a woman, it would be seen as the weirdest thing ever. A feminist fantasy or some kind of motherhood theme or something like that. But it's not any weirder than "all male ravagers". And it is weird to enforce this kind of sex segregation in sci-fi/fantasy environments. That is, I don't think there's an artistic statement or message here, I think it's simply carelessness, not realizing how odd it is to make all minor characters male.

Had no other plans after Christmas morning stuff, so I hit a double feature yesterday; THE DISASTER ARTIST and DOWNSIZING.

The Disaster Artist is excellent at depicting what it depicts, i.e., the story of the making of The Room. (Btw, you don't have to have seen The Room to appreciate this, but it would help to at least catch some of the uhhh, highlights, on YouTube.) The performances by James and especially Dave Franco are great, and there are fun supporting performances by Bob Odenkirk, Seth Rogan, Zac Efron, and others.

But, ultimately, although I enjoyed sitting there watching it, it felt disappointing, because it wasn't all that funny. Oh, there are definitely some funny parts during the making of the film section, but still, overall, it feels more sad and tragic than funny. And even a lot of the funny parts are only funny in a cringing kind of way. And sure, I give it points for showing how sad and tragic this guy is, and depicting that drama well, and showing how he affected his friend who came along for the ride. But then, spoiler alert, but you should know this already... the movie becomes a cult hit. And that's what really feels weird afterward. Because the guy is genuinely an asshole. I mean, really an asshole. And with no actual talent. And yet, there's a sense at the end of, oh it's okay, because somehow it worked out for you, anyway. Hooray for you, Tommy! Yay, American/Hollywood dream!

I'm all for the idea of things that show and celebrate persevering in the face of extreme challenge and making something creative because you had the balls to do it, even when everyone else tells you that you'll fail. I suppose that is the one thing that is redeemable about this guy. He did actually make a movie. But even then, he had the money to do it, somehow. It cost 6 million dollars to make. And he was able to promote it enough where enough people could see it to realize how bad it is. Otherwise, it would have been forgotten among so many bad movies that go straight to video and then straight to the bargain bin. I'm much more apt to applaud someone like the makers of The Blair Witch Project, who scraped together $20,000 to make a decent horror film and then had wild success with it. Or Kevin Smith with Clerks. To me, that's success against the odds that's worth celebrating.

One of my favorite films of all time is Ed Wood, and Disaster Artist is in a similar ballpark to celebrate someone who has become famous for having huge drive, but little or no actual talent. But in the case of Ed Wood, he wasn't an asshole (at least, as depicted in the film). And he had what I might call some sliver of real vision and talent, but just no means to see it through... and, as the film delightfully points out, no sense of editing or quality control to his work, when every shot was "perfect!"

Certainly the story of The Room is worth telling, and I like that the focus of Disaster Artist ends up being more on Greg, the friend of Tommy Wiseau. I just ultimately felt weird about its conclusion, as if Tommy is somehow redeemed for being an asshole and making a bewilderingly terrible movie, just because it's SO terrible of a movie that people can appreciate it for that.

On the other hand, I almost had to give Tommy Wiseau a little bit more credit after having seen Downsizing, because that ended up being a terrible movie made by someone who had every right and talent to not make a terrible movie.

I saw the trailer for Downsizing months ago and thought, what a great premise. This is going to be fun! Kristen Wiig, Matt Damon, Jason Sudeikis, Christoph Waltz... Fun, right? No. Just, no. From the very beginning, you get a sense that this is going to be humorless. It immediately has the tone of taking its premise very seriously and showing how things might be if this kind of thing actually happened. And so then, after a little while I was like, oh okay, it almost has more of a Kubrick feel to it, with some of the shot composition and the very stark feel to the dialogue. Okay, I can roll with this and appreciate it on that level. And the world-building of the premise is very well developed early on. But then, no. It just continues being so very unentertaining. That's probably not a word or a very good description, but it defines how I feel perfectly. It just rolls on and shows you stuff, but there's never anything exciting or amusing, and only barely interesting.

And then about halfway through it gets kind of um, preachy and Important (capital I), and *really* tedious. No more fun concepts or implications about this miniaturized world from that point on. And still, the ideas and messages of it aren't bad ones, per se. But I couldn't help but think how the movie I expected to see... a breezy satirical comedy... could have given the same essential messages but with that spoonful of sugar. And then, in a movie that has been almost completely humorless, there are a couple of attempts at overt jokes very late in the movie. And by that time, what?? Really??? Sorry, movie... You don't get to do that at this point.

It's a fucking mess. But unfortunately, not enough of a mess to be appreciated like The Room, which is almost worse of a crime for Downsizing.

Mad Dog wrote: Had fun watching the new Jumanji. Changing it to a video game worked a lot better than I thought it would.

I just came back from it and loved it. It starred Dwayne Johnson and Karen Gillan’s belly.