these women are not funny

Rocketman could've gotten nominated for more shit, honestly. No best actor nod for Tom Egerton? Shame.

Parasite

Palme d'Or recipient, Best Picture nomination, 99% on Rotten Tomatoes. The accolades this movie has received are seemingly endless, and because of that, this was easily my most anticipated movie for this project.. Which is why I'm sad to report that I was actually quite disappointed with it.

In theory, I should probably love any movie that has anti-capitalist sentiments, but as it turns out, I need a lot more from a movie than just having a message that I agree with for me to consider it good, let alone a masterpiece.

Yeah, it's cool that the movie provides some commentary on class structure and how capitalism can break people, and it does so in a very mature and nuanced fashion that doesn't just boil down to "rich people bad" (even though I probably would've been satisfied with just that), because the poor family in this film are presented as an utterly execrable group of people, which actually made it quite difficult for me to sympathize with them. Especially considering that they're all drunks.

But I do need more from movies than this, because the biggest problem I have with the way the characters are written is that I don't actually like any of them. As a result, I don't really care about any of them, either, because they all just annoy me. I can't like the Kims, because they're bastards for trying to usurp another family's house. I can't like the boy, because he's obsessed with kissing up on some underage girl. I can't like the Parks, because they're stupid rich fucks. I don't have anyone to care about in this movie.

Now, you don't have to like the characters in a movie for it to be good, necessarily—especially when that's part of the point of the story. Okay, I can accept that. What else does the movie offer, then?

Good performances? Yeah, I suppose it does. Were they amazing, though? I don't think so. There's that one part where the Kim girl is drunk, and she sounds convincingly inebriated. It made me dislike her character more, because I fucking hate drunk people, but sure, it was a great little performance. That was the only moment that stood out to me.

Does it have a good plot? Sure. It's definitely original, too. I don't think many movies have been made with this concept before, and it certainly felt fresh in that regard. But being fresh doesn't mean it was great, though. It wasn't very engaging on a moment-to-moment basis, and it had a tendency to drag at points. Which is very strange, because people have been saying that the pacing is one of the movie's strong points, whereas I didn't get that impression at all.

Was it funny? Well, it never made me laugh. Not even once. Not even internally. Is it just some cultural thing that I'm not privy to? If so, my brain was still able to recognize a good number of jokes. It's just that none of them were that funny, which is kind of a problem when the movie's supposed to be a black comedy.

Was it thrilling? No, and for a lot of reasons, namely that it's too predictable. Any time there's a scene that makes you go, "Uh-oh! They're really in for it now!" always ends in some uninspired fashion, and there's a number of dumb cliches at play here, too. Like the scene where the boy is hiding under the girl's bed, but the dog sees him. And of course, she gets distracted just a moment away from looking under the bed herself.

Then there's the part where the Kims are down in the secret basement, eavesdropping behind the wall of the staircase they're hiding on, when suddenly they just fucking trip down and reveal themselves. If this never happened, the rest of the movie wouldn't have happened either. It was really stupid, and that's why the movie isn't very thrilling. It just has all these cliche scenes where you either know exactly what's going to happen every time, or something incredibly fucking stupid happens, which makes them tedious to watch. It's the exact opposite of thrilling.

The score was passable but nothing extraordinary. The cinematography was good, but nothing special. Everyone on set apparently did their job well, but for whatever reason, the movie just didn't click with me.

There's so many stupid scenes, like that goddam morse code scene at the end, or this uncomfortably long and awkward-ass moment where the Parks are lying on the couch, and they just start groping each other while their little boy is outside in a tent. They never have sex; it's just a long groping scene where we have to endure them feeling each other up for what felt like 5 minutes (it definitely wasn't actually that long, though). I fucking hate scenes like this. Why is it necessary? Why do I need to see it? Take it out, and it instantly becomes a better movie.

I don't know. I wish I could get behind everyone else and agree that this movie's some kind of masterpiece, but I just wasn't feeling it at all. I'm open to giving it another viewing at some point, but I'm not terribly excited about the prospect of doing so.

I'm genuinely feeling like a 5/10 on this one. Really just don't get the hype, and I'm extremely bummed about that, because as I was saying, I never want to say that I didn't like a movie that critiques capitalism, or has anything to say about the class struggle. On one hand, I'm delighted that this movie's getting more people interested in foreign cinema, but on the other, I just wish it could've been a more engaging movie. I wanted to stan for a foreign film at the Oscars this year, but I genuinely can't do that, because it's way too difficult for me to lie to myself and say I loved it like everyone else did.

It wouldn't be the first time I went against the grain, but it's the first time in a long time that I actually felt bad about doing so. I seriously wanted to like this one SO much, and I just didn't.

That said, it seems that my time to watch the rest of these movies has run out. I saw a good number of them, and I might try to squeeze in a couple more at the last minute, but I'll have to start thinking about the rest of my predictions, which I'll try to post later.

the scum that i scrape beneath my heel every morning is more respectable than that repugnant pile of pusillanimous shit

i feel this way because my IQ is higher than 10

that's pretty goddamn cool

i'd have picked a better toy story though

The Lion King



4/10

Probably deserves lower, but when it comes to rating remakes, I think I have a slightly different philosophy than you might expect. While it's true that everything good about this remake (the story, the characters, the music) is simply part of the groundwork laid out by the original film, they're still in the film—so to give the movie something like a 1/10, in my view, would be to say that the film didn't retain the strong characters (somewhat), wasn't (relatively) faithful to the story, and lacks the amazing score of Hans Zimmer (overrated as he is).

But none of that is true. It has all of these things—and with some state-of-the-art visual effects to boot. Now, I'm not trying to say the movie is good, by any means—I'm giving it a 4/10, for fuck's sake. I just don't believe in giving movies a 1/10 so easily. Scores that low are special to me. To give a movie like this a score like that would be almost to validate it in some way. Giving it a 4/10, on my scale, marks it with a basic "bad movie" status, and allows for it to receive the fate it truly deserves: to be swiftly forgotten.

That being said:

This was the last Disney movie that needed to be remade. Literally every aspect of it is significantly worse than the original. I don't even need to tell you not to watch it at this point, but don't. It is ungood.

I only saw it because it's nominated for one thing—Best Visual Effects—which happens to be the first category I've completed so far. And, if I'm honest, as much as I disliked it, I'm hard-pressed to argue in favor of any of these other nominations.

Avengers: Endgame—Sure, this movie had pretty decent visual effects for a superhero movie... I guess. But absolutely nothing that couldn't be found pretty much anywhere else in the series.

The Irishman—Pretty good aging and de-aging effects, but nothing Oscar-worthy. I think I commented before on how distracting Robert De Niro's bright-ass contact lenses were.

1917—Pretty typical bog-standard war movie effects. Not to knock the film as a whole, of course. I did still enjoy it, but as far as effects go, there really wasn't anything particularly special about it.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker—Again, nothing special. They're the exact kind of effects you'd expect to see in a modern-day space action-adventure flick. Not bad, but nothing that stands out to me as amazing.

Yeah, I don't think I could justify giving the Oscar to anything but The Lion King, as much as it pains me to say it. I wasn't absolutely blown away by its effects, or anything, but objectively speaking, in a vacuum, between these five films, it simply has the best visual effects. I hate that this remake exists as much as anybody else, but not enough to lie to myself about it. We'll see if it stands the test of time, but seeing as they were going for photorealism, it probably won't.

The worst thing about it is that the effects tend to ruin a big part of what made the original so charming—facial anthropomorphization allows for each character's emotions and personality to shine through, and having a more realistic style effectively eliminates that shit. So while the effects are amazing in a vacuum, they actually kind of suck a lot when you put them in context.

If I wanted to be spiteful and pick something else to win, I'd probably go with either Avengers or Star Wars. They both have the same caliber of effects; maybe the effects in Avengers were slightly better, I don't know. It definitely shouldn't go to The Irishman, and it definitely shouldn't go to 1917.

So, there you have my first official prediction. Maybe I'll do it in this format to lock it in:

Best Visual Effects
Prediction: The Lion King
Personal opinion: The Lion King

pokemon home is going to be $16 a year

compare this to bank's $5 a year + being on a system that doesn't require you to pay for its online service

fucking outrageous

The Edge of Democracy

This is a Brazilian documentary that's pretty much about how fucked the Brazilian government is. Focusing primarily on their two most recent ex-presidents, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, it's a documentary that is sure to set flames in your head no matter what your political affiliations are.

For a bit of context, Lula was a union leader who founded the Workers' Party in Brazil, and is of far-left ideology. He ran unsuccessfully for president on three occasions before finally winning in 2002, serving two terms. Despite being one of the most charismatic and popular politicians ever during his tenure, public opinion had eventually soured as he became embroiled in corruption scandals and other controversies discussed in the documentary.

Dilma Rousseff was Lula's Chief of Staff before succeeding him in office, becoming the first female president of Brazil. A socialist who was tortured in her youth by the military in the '70s, back when Brazil was a dictatorship, her election was seen as a beacon of hope for leftists, but in 2016, during her second term, she got impeached and subsequently removed from office for breaking budgetary laws (people also really grew to hate her).

Now, I'm just a dumb American who's never had anything to say or think about Brazil, so whenever the movie takes a dive into some deeply complex political scandals, like Operation Car Wash, I'm not gonna lie, a lot of that shit goes way over my head. I'd love to learn more, of course, but since I don't live in Brazil, it's not exactly pertinent information to me, and over the past four years, I've been feeling increasingly disillusioned towards politics in general anyway. As it stands, my sole political function is to hate the orange man in America. Nonetheless, I still found myself trying to draw parallels between the Brazilian government and my own, so I was able to use that as a basis for my overall engagement. Anyone who happens to be more invested than I am when it comes to world politics will probably have an easier time keeping up without needing to do stuff like that.

This documentary is also highly sympathetic to its two democratically-elected subjects, so anyone who's on the right will probably consider this to be Marxist propaganda and will be infuriated by it. It also ends on an excruciatingly bleak note, so beware of that. It's on Netflix right now, so if it sounds like it's up your alley, I'd check it out.

I was a little bit more engaged by American Factory, personally, but as far as overall quality of presentation goes, I'd say they're on par with each other. I certainly don't expect this to take the Oscar, because I think most Americans are in the same boat as me when it comes to this kind of stuff (in that they don't care, or don't wanna put in the effort to understand it. Which is sad, but also reality).

Quote from: Casper on January 28, 2020, 08:10:16 PM

Quote from: Cheat on January 28, 2020, 01:22:37 PM

You want a staff job and you want a staff job. Anyone care about what I want?

oh wow you really are becoming a woman

It’s a SM3 quote.

sick reference

your references are out of control

Buffed:

Ryu
Ken
Samus/Dark Samus
Cloud
Dr. Mario
Shiek (these don't look like they will do much though)
Young Link
Toon Link

how'd you miss zelda, i think she easily won the entire patch

also fuck zelda HOLY SHIT why would they buff her most annoying moves

i win again

eat my shit, entire internet

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

I like a good ol' Tarantino flick as much as the next idiot, but this one took a considerably different direction than his "normal" work, and I'm not 100% sure if I ultimately liked it or not. Similar to The Irishman, it feels very mature and deliberately paced, yet it still manages to be engaging enough to feel half its length, which is pretty remarkable, considering that it's 2h40m. To pull that off is truly a testament to Tarantino's mastery.

However, I honestly kind of struggle to figure out what the point of this movie is. I don't know if it's a failure on the movie's part to communicate its message in a coherent way, assuming it has one at all, or if I'm just slow on the uptake, but the movie is SOOOO fucking scattershot (even by Quentin's standards) that by the end of the movie, despite being thoroughly entertained, I can't help but think that I just spent 3 hours watching a whole lot of nothing. Sitting here right now, typing this, I could not even begin to explain the plot.

Here, honestly, is the best I can do in one quick paragraph: It's about an actor and his stunt double in late '60s Hollywood. They do things, things happen, and yeah, it's just kind of a big potpourri of random fucking shit. Sharon Tate shows up and the Manson Family gets involved. Even Bruce Lee (humorously interpreted as an arrogant blowhard) shows up just to get beaten up by Brad Pitt's character for basically no reason. It's an ivory tower slice-of-life, you could say.

There's an element of humor to how the film has one of the most star-studded casts imaginable, yet refuses to give any of them a single thing to do. It's funny, but again, I don't know if I REALLY like that. I like stories about nothing, but usually, the whole point is that, in spite of the mundanity of the plot, there's still something to get out of the experience, and if I'm perfectly honest, I didn't really get anything out of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Maybe if I saw it again, I would, and I don't even know if that's really a problem to begin with. It's just that I can't say the same about any other Tarantino movie that I've seen.

The end, of course, has this very intense, comical, and fiery explosion of Tarantino's trademark ridiculous over-the-top violence, which is as cathartic and satisfying as it has ever been, but on some level, it feels pretty stupid, in the sense that the rest of the movie is almost totally devoid of any serious levels of violence, so they had to trick the idiots in the audience into thinking the movie was for them, because they saw Brad Pitt cave someone's skull in, and it was totally fucking awesome dude.

I don't know. As far as Tarantino films go, this one ranks pretty low for me, but I'm also very bemused about the experience, and I probably need to see it again with a different set of eyes. Who knows? Maybe I'll watch again and decide that it's actually just dogshit, or something. But for now, I think I enjoyed it, because on a moment to moment basis, it's still a very fun movie. I just didn't love it, especially not as much as I thought I should've. 7/10

---

Tentative ranking of the films I've seen so far:

1. I Lost My Body
2. The Irishman
3. Marriage Story

4. Joker
5. 1917
6. Knives Out
7. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

8. Klaus
9. The Two Popes
10. Avengers: Endgame
11. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

Mordo's post

aw, i thought it was great

i haven't seen the marketing myself—the only promotion i've seen whatsoever is adam from YMS's 9/10 review and recommendation—so i don't know if the film is trying to be "realistic" so much as it's just trying to be emotionally potent, and i think it succeeds heavily in that regard

even so, i'd still argue that there's a lot of realism to the film, from the script to the performances, but as you pointed out, most people would probably have trouble relating to a couple of "hot shot professional artists" (although, as a wannabe hotshot artist myself, i was able to relate somewhat with the two characters on that basis a tiny bit more than the average bear, i suppose, which did noticeably increase my personal enjoyment)

whatever realism the film does have is only there, imo, to ground the film and prevent the audience from becoming totally alienated—because, like you said, most people will struggle to relate with a couple of snooty career artists

but rather than hamstring these characters by making them more relatable to regular people, the film tries MUCH harder (and successfully, in my opinion) to make them likable—the movie opens with the two describing all the things they love about each other, as we see examples of those behaviors on screen (which, now that i think about it, is kind of a clever take on the age-old "show don't tell" advice often given to novice writers, because the opening scene of this movie opts to show and tell simultaneously—idk, i think that's kinda cool)

to write this scene off as merely listing idiosyncrasies seems odd to me—how do you generally prefer to grow attached to your characters, if not learning about their idiosyncratic personalities? it's not like they're presented as perfect people—their flaws are strewn about and laid bare throughout the entire film

furthermore, you don't think the scene where Charlie finds the divorce papers on the kitchen counter to be a realistic interaction? how Nicole just awkwardly steps in and is like, "yeah sorry," and Charlie gets all suspicious about the pie that her sister had before she fucked everything up, prompting Nicole to have to explain that it was nothing, etc. etc. and in the end, Charlie just looks so fucking bewildered by the whole situation, and he's like "so like... what do I do next?"

or how about the scene, my personal favorite, with the custody evaluation lady, where Charlie's trying to demonstrate the knife trick that his son brought up at dinner, and he's so nervous that he cuts himself? maybe you're not a clumsy fuck like me, but that single scene, i thought, was such a painfully accurate snapshot of two awkward people trying to interact with each other that i bust a gut every time i watch it—especially when he's stumbling around his kitchen, trying to tend to this horrifying wound he has while hiding it from his son

those are just two scenes, but for me, this movie was filled to the brim with moments like that

have you ever done something annoying around your dad, prompting him to just lash out at you? the part where the kid wouldn't get in the car cracks me up—"Henry, get in the fucking car. [beat] I'm sorry, but Jesus, get in the fucking car."

that's real shit

the characters are so likable, you don't know who to root for, because you want BOTH of them to happy—but because they have such strong cases against each other, and because their lawyers are so aggressive, it makes it all the more painful when it all explodes in the argument scene

you criticized the bit where Charlie punches the wall, and i agree somewhat that the punch almost seemed too light and that the crack was added in post or something, but i'm not an expert on blunt force, and i don't know how strong walls typically are, since i've never punched one myself, but i can agree it wasn't the most convincing physical outburst

i suppose you could argue it shows that he's hesitant to do any real damage, but in that case, he probably shouldn't have left the mark at alll, since while it does last, it doesn't really come up again (i don't even think the evaluation lady asks about it, strangely enough)

you also did say the whole scene was entertaining for the wrong reasons, though, and that was the only part you singled out—i'm curious to know what else you thought was wrong with the scene, because i thought it was fantastic through and through, and one of the best singular scenes out of anything i've watched so far

idk, i guess if the movie wasn't for you, that's okay—i just thought it kicked ass enough to respond to some of your points about it

pretty much exactly how i want it to be going

1917

I saw this and forgot to post about it, so here I am. This was pretty cool—I think this wound up winning best picture at the Golden Globes, or something, which I don't necessarily agree with, but it was still a pretty solid picture. Although I feel that it ultimately boils down to a pretty basic war story, I do have to echo Napalm's sentiments about the trademark Roger Deakins cinematography. It looks beautiful, and several of its shots continue to stick out in my mind.

Of course, the whole one-take gimmick is inherently impressive, and even if it's made a bit too obvious where each of the cuts are, the fact that everything looks like one seamless shot gives us the opportunity to spend every waking moment with these characters, so knowing that anything can happen to them at literally any second adds a unique sense of tension that you just don't really get as much in more heavily-edited films.

I thought the movie did a fantastic job at capturing some of the most terrifying moments in war, like seeing a figure off in the distance walking towards you, unable to be sure whether they're friend or foe until it's almost too late to run away, or wanting to spare the life of a pinned down enemy, scared for his life, only to end up getting stabbed, because despite your good intentions, they still have no reason to assume you won't torture them. Fucked up shit like that. It's my favorite type of war film: No romanticizing, no glorification. It only shows you the horror, the pain, and the messiness of it all.

I wasn't expecting much from director Sam Mendes, given that he's made Jarhead, which I thought flat-out sucked, but I was pleasantly surprised with this one in the end. It's nominated for TEN goddamn awards, and I think it deserves at least one of them.

Maybe not best picture, because I still enjoyed Marriage Story and The Irishman more. Maybe not best director either, although I still think he outdid himself. The screenplay nomination is straight-up undeserved; I really don't think the script was anything special at all, but it's also not even really that kind of movie to begin with. The score was pretty typical Hollywood fare, to be honest, and didn't really stand out to me. The production design seemed pretty good; maybe it could win that one. The visual effects were fine, but it's going to get utterly stomped by the competition in that category. The makeup/hairstyling nomination feels... odd. It was as good as it needed it be, I suppose, but it's not a very cosmetically intensive movie by any means.

The remaining three (sound editing, sound mixing, and cinematography) are the ones it has the best shot at winning, I think. They're also the ones I feel it deserves the most.

7/10