The Official Movie Thread

Giving this a go tonight.....

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Watched Thor: Love and Thunder...

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At this point I don't know how they rescue Thor from being an unserious retarded meme character going forward.

Taika Waititi needs to be kicked out of the MCU club. This was like having autistic TikTok videos spammed at you for like 2 hours. A (literal) couple of laughs, the final act has some cool action, but ultimately the writing was abysmal, the comedy was shit (screaming goats, Zeus talking like Fat Pizza, Stormbringer acting like a jealous girlfriend...), nothing had any gravitas, and I didn't feel invested in anything happening. The whole movie needed a laugh track. I didn't get the director's obsession with Guns N Roses either. Like, huh?

Even with Jane Foster DYING it still felt silly. She was also the coolest part of the movie to me.

I know it's dumb to take these MCU movies seriously, but this one really feels like the lowest point so far. Bad omens for the next phase, especially if they continue this dumb trend of injecting more and more comedy into the projects.
 
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Waititi is utterly incapable of understanding tone. I just read that he wanted it to be a romantic comedy inspired by 80's adventure movies, and none of that came through.

But yeah Phase 4 is super uneven. I liked Spider-Man: No Way Home a lot, I thought the new Dr. Strange was kinda fun, and you know I'm a Eternals defender, but Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, Moon Knight? All trash. Also the Black Widow movie might be my #1 biggest let down so far.

I'm also not exactly looking forward to Wakanda Forever.
 
obviously a very debatable sentence, but i'm not sure anyone since griffith has propelled film forward the way he did. it's become a cliché to say it in every obituary but he really did change the landscape of cinema and basically created the filmic 'language' that took hold over the past half century, even as he himself rejected a lot of his own 'lessons' and constantly sought to push further into new territory. it's wild to consider the diverse range of directors who were directly and strongly influenced by him: tarantino, wong kar-wai, kiarostami, fassbinder, scorsese, von trier to name a few. tarantino's probably the best analogue for his initial run though; he was essentially the QT of the '60s in terms of spirit and impact, only when he was doing it it was a much bigger leap, and had far more weight and purpose intellectually and politically speaking.

and obviously, he was part of the single most important movement in the history of film criticism as well, so his influence goes beyond his filmmaking. he played a very big part in rescuing the reputations of the likes of hitchcock and hawks, who subsequently influenced probably 75+% of beloved films nowadays (no lynch without hitch, no carpenter without hawks, etc). so i reckon in terms of overall impact and influence there are very very few above him.
 
I really don't know the first thing about Godard; occasionally I hear him namedropped and I have no idea what people are talking about. Is there anything you'd recommend reading or watching to get a good idea of what he's about?
 
I really don't know the first thing about Godard; occasionally I hear him namedropped and I have no idea what people are talking about. Is there anything you'd recommend reading or watching to get a good idea of what he's about?

i don't really have reading recs but i can give a cliff notes summary: he's inextricably associated with the french new wave (nouvelle vague) which was basically the cinema equivalent of the beatles, a bunch of young stylish frenchies who took over a renowned filmcrit magazine called cahiers du cinema and used it to challenge a lot of conventional assumptions and 'rules' about good cinema, changing public perceptions of a lot of filmmakers in the process, then went on to make dizzyingly fresh films for young people that dissolved the highbrow/lowbrow divide and mixed experimentation and left wing politics with poppy genre tropes, beautiful scantily clad girls etc (you may have heard his famous quote "all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun"). his debut breathless was a pretty seismic event across the world in the 1960 in a similar way to how the summer of love impacted popular music. the other key figures of the movement were truffaut, chabrol, rivette and rohmer, all of whom had their own personalities and styles, but godard was the true revolutionary of the bunch and has several phases to his career each of which vehemently rejected the last, for good or ill he was constantly bending and breaking the boundaries of what movies could be. he was also notoriously a cantankerous difficult prick who pissed a lot of people off, and some of his later stuff is basically impenetrable. the early famous stuff is much more accessible but still very self-aware and playfully experimental and aggressively-stylised and fucking french, so i dunno if you'd like it. last time i dug in i had trouble with a lot of it but i'm gonna watch/rewatch some shortly and i think i'll be a bit more receptive these days, partly because my love for desplechin has opened my mind to pretentious french shit lol. week-end might be a good one for you to try as it's post-apocalyptic and widely regarded as one of his best.
 
obviously a very debatable sentence, but i'm not sure anyone since griffith has propelled film forward the way he did. it's become a cliché to say it in every obituary but he really did change the landscape of cinema and basically created the filmic 'language' that took hold over the past half century, even as he himself rejected a lot of his own 'lessons' and constantly sought to push further into new territory. it's wild to consider the diverse range of directors who were directly and strongly influenced by him: tarantino, wong kar-wai, kiarostami, fassbinder, scorsese, von trier to name a few. tarantino's probably the best analogue for his initial run though; he was essentially the QT of the '60s in terms of spirit and impact, only when he was doing it it was a much bigger leap, and had far more weight and purpose intellectually and politically speaking.

and obviously, he was part of the single most important movement in the history of film criticism as well, so his influence goes beyond his filmmaking. he played a very big part in rescuing the reputations of the likes of hitchcock and hawks, who subsequently influenced probably 75+% of beloved films nowadays (no lynch without hitch, no carpenter without hawks, etc). so i reckon in terms of overall impact and influence there are very very few above him.

You make a decent argument there.
 
I really don't know the first thing about Godard; occasionally I hear him namedropped and I have no idea what people are talking about. Is there anything you'd recommend reading or watching to get a good idea of what he's about?

His big 4 are Breathless, Contempt, Pierrot le Fou and Week-end. I really like the first two, haven't seen Pierrot, and dislike Week-end although it does still have some very iconic scenes. Week-end is the most experimental of the four and can be very alienating; I wouldn't start with that one.
 
Allow me to honour the spirit of this discussion by talking about Larry Fessenden's big killer lake fish.

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I watched Beneath (2013) which was pretty fun. The practical effects were easily the soul of the movie. I was expecting to like it more than I did (didn't hate it though at all) but the characters were all so utterly retarded that it was hard to fully immerse into the plot. By the end I had convinced myself that a) it's more a satire of teen movies rather than a straight portrayal of teens in a fucked up situation, and b) Larry is trolling us all.

The other slight disconnect was the tone and atmosphere. The soundtrack was weirdly uneven. At times they'd use a pulsing synth that matched perfectly with what was going on, but at other times there's just no music at all but it'll be during a tense dramatic dialogue-heavy scene and it made it feel very detached and amatuerish in a way I didn't necessarily like.

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I will always have a soft spot for natural horrors (especially when they avoid CGI) so ultimately the shortcomings didn't ruin it for me, but after seeing Wendigo and Depraved I was expecting more from a Fessenden horror. Recommended if you like tense 'giant monster' horrors.
 
Just watched Thor: Love and Thunder, I liked it. To be honest, I don't like to go to the cinema, I like to watch movies at home. Don't know why but it's true, maybe it's much more comfortable for me. Besides, I have Firestick and thanks to this website https://www.firesticktricks.com/install-kodi-on-firestick.html I installed many cool apps. Now I have access to any media content.
i love going to the cinema
to me it's so much better than seeing a movie for the first time on a TV screen or a phone screen
to me, "going to the movies" is really fun