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The writing of the first act alone and the confusion over the protagonist was magnificent to me. I had an absolute blast in the theater with this one.
Doesn't really juggle its messages and influences as skillfully as it seems to think it does. I had a hard time watching this in the theater because so much of it was just plain cringe-y to me. I know people are absolutely adoring this film, but it felt like a shallow misunderstanding of The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver to me.
Phoenix gives a solid performance and the cinematography is good though.
Genuinely don’t understand the hate for this film. I thought it was pretty solid. I was moved. Great cinematography.
Relies too heavily on the novels and Kubrick's film to ever really feel like it has legs enough to stand on its own. Although there are interesting bits in this film, it does not ever come to fruition in a meaningful way and often seems to misunderstand the thesis behind the novel it's based on. Instead, Doctor Sleep chugs along at a dreary pace until its third act goes completely off the rails. For the majority of this film I thought it was decent. As soon as we got to the climax it became dreadful. Yikes.
It's a film you've seen before many times. You know what it's really about. You know how it'll end. You know why it's made. It's that kind of self-burn you've watched a million times. It's often pretentious. It's feels like you should dislike it. It's indulgent, right?
No.
Biopics are a dime a dozen. And they are overdone. It's kind of exhausting to continually watch the same type of narrative. He was tortured! He was an asshole! He was probably scum! But! He was a brilliant artist. Most movies go like that. All That Jazz seems to strafe so dangerously close to that territory over and over. But it kind of blows way past that so effortlessly.
This is one of the most self-indulgent films I've seen in a very particular fashion. But let me ask you: would it work any other way? There's an understanding that this indulgence never glorifies Gideon. It almost vilifies him. There are people around him who care for him--begrudgingly, probably. Every time it feels like Gideon succeeds, it comes at the heels of fate dragging him down. I cannot imagine the kind of critical eye you must have to turn on yourself in order to make a movie so totally filled with loathing for your persona.
I haven't seen a movie this good in a long, long time.
Me watching Parasite twice and then thinking about it is to continually give side-eye to Joker. Every issue I had with Phillips's bungle (and I have plenty) is presented brilliantly and effortlessly with this masterwork of class commentary. Darkly funny, shockingly thrilling, and the ending is a doozy. If you haven't seen Parasite yet, you have done yourself a tremendous disservice. This is the film of the year. Period.
Magnificent. Scorsese just keeps coming and I am here for it. The acting. The directing. The writing. The editing!
The Irishman is basically Sadfellas and that is a big complement.
There's a similar impact His House has to Incendies. The truths put to screen here have intense power dealing with the weight we put on those just trying to survive. I'm here for all the socially conscious horror. I anxiously await Remi Weekes's next project
I mean this honestly, truly, and the most appropriate sense of the word: whoops. Just about nothing in this film worked for me, down to the foley done in post. I have a laundry list of reasons why this film really didn't gel with me, but I'll mostly let my rating speak for itself.
Aside from one thing I just need to say: horror has a tenuous relationship with mental illness. It's a historic tie and link going back a long, long time. But what Oculus does that feels so particularly stinky to me is a similar issue that I have with every project I've seen from Flanagan: it exploits that illness after deliberately attempting to be empathetic towards it. Example: in Doctor Sleep, Dan is a recovering alcoholic. The entire story, really, is an allegory for recovering from addiction. And in that film, there's a moment where a character goes to pour himself a drink to take the edge off...and it's played as a joke. In a movie that wants you to believe it's empathetic towards addiction.
The entirety of Oculus forces one of its main characters to relive his trauma, the trauma that got him sent to a mental institution for eleven years. He's only released after he's declared healthy by his doctor. And immediately he is meant to go back through the same treatment by force only for him to end up right where he started, this time likely without any chance of ever being released. It suggests to the viewer (and particularly to those struggling with mental illness) that no matter how much time, money, and effort you pour into getting healthy you will never be able to escape that illness. You will relapse. And let me be very, very clear: that is a terrible thing to tell people.
Some of the action shots are neat. Most everything else is not. Oof. At best, it's a little bland. At worst it's a derivative mess of tropes and cliches that feel less satisfying that its predecessor. At the very least The Maze Runner had an intriguing setup. The truth of the matter is that JJ Abrams's mystery box philosophy proves true here: the answers we are given are significantly less interesting than the questions asked.
Just play The Last of Us instead.
Unexpectedly more interesting than I was anticipating, but also more of a let-down. There's an immense set-up and big questions asked that are payed off in the least satisfying way that only works to set up the rest of the franchise. Now, that said I am actually intrigued to know where the story goes from here because I legitimately was not even kind of expecting that the entire world that was ominously built in the first half would be completely thrown out by the end only suggesting that we'll never see that maze again lol.
But really, I think what was the most interesting about The Maze Runner is how I somehow knew absolutely nothing about it. The first book came out when I was 14. I had kind of moved out of young adult fiction at that point, but I had friends that were younger than me so I'm kind of shocked that I knew literally zilch about this story. I never read a page of these books, I never even saw a trailer for these films. They only popped up on my radar when my younger cousin mentioned the films to me a few years ago and then I realized that director Wes Ball also went to my alma mater. It's kind of cool, I guess, for my involvement with these stories because it means I am going in 100% blind with actually zero expectations. To me, this is just something in the vein of The Hunger Games, which admittedly, wasn't my cup of tea at the time they were coming out. So to be honest, despite the incessant franchise setup I actually found myself having a pretty good time watching The Maze Runner.
I'll go on a tangent. I grew up with Harry Potter and, like so many people in the world, they were foundational to my upbringing and my identity. They still are, to be honest. I re-read them frequently. I love them very much. But the older I get and the more I interact with young adult epics as an adult, the more I realize just how good those novels really are. We can go back on forth about them on a literary level and the artistic rigor of Rowling's prose, but what I mean here is the storytelling of the series. Rowling keyed into loss, tragedy, ambivalence of humanity, and evil really well, but did it all through an incredibly charming and whimsical lens. Central to this is Harry's characterization. He's a boy not unlike Thomas in how he begins his journey, but the arc that he goes through has a significantly more weighty piece of development. It's about self-worth. It's about overcoming adversity through strength of character and I've always linked Harry's struggles to my own struggles with depression. Thomas, although more charismatic from the get-go, doesn't feel like there's a whole lot for him to grow into. That's okay. It's not really about that in The Maze Runner, but it just makes me love the YA series of my youth that much more.
Alex Garland has been buzzing around the sci-fi world for awhile now. He has his hooks in the community and gained a lot of popularity writing for Boyle on several of his projects--to varying levels of success, imo. Ex Machina was a big step: the directorial debut. And although it features absolutely stellar visuals and acting, the writing itself fell just slightly short of where the rest of the film took me. I make it sound worse than it is. Ex Machina truly is a magnificent movie and I do very much love it, but the script just didn't quite gel with me. It's very on rails. It didn't leave a whole lot up for guesswork in the viewing experience for me. I kind of knew exactly where we were going. That might be the point and that might be exactly why a lot of people love it, but it did detract from the film for me, even if only slightly.
And that's why I anticipated Annihilation so highly. I felt like Garland was right on the cusp of something and when I saw that trailer I had a feeling I was about to get what I was looking for. It's pretty rare, as a viewer, to see a film that feels like it's right up your alley in a way that few other projects really seem to be. And every single second of Annihilation works like that for me. The weird sci-fi, the Lovecraftian overtones, and the feeling of utter depression amidst one of the most beautiful worlds I've ever seen. It's also terrifying.
It's kind of like LOST with a more overt horror influence. It's polarizing though, I know. Some will think it's too vague, some will think it just doesn't offer a whole lot, and the cinephiles might say it's too reminiscent of Stalker (but, ugh, hard disagree). I don't care though. This is one of the best science fiction films ever made.
Never really develops its own internal logic beyond its initial premise, which makes for a frustratingly bland plot. There's never a moment where we're left to really question whether or not the invisible man is actually real or in the space with Cecilia and as a result the suspense never landed with me. Perhaps the filmmakers knew this too because there are far too many jump scares. The Invisible Man is a misunderstanding of how both suspense and horror work in a technical sense. Also, there's incredibly misplaced humor. Whoops.
Masterful tonal control in a hilariously anxious trip that is so unique to the Safdies.
This is how I win.
I rewatched The Rise of Skywalker the other day in honor of May the Fourth. I've been steadily rewatching the franchise (as I basically always am) and as I made my way back through it I was hit in the face with a bag of bricks with a realization: all these movies are good to varying degrees, but if you want to look at each trilogy as its own entity it becomes absolutely fascinating. The original trilogy is a fan favorite. It has two of the strongest entries of the whole deal and it gets bonus points for kicking off this absolute unit. But it also feels extraordinarily limited at times, not by technology but in an understanding for how a universe can exist. This is through no fault of the films or the talent behind them, who could have really known what Star Wars would become? I think my most nuclear take at this point, though, is that the prequel trilogy is actually lowkey the best trilogy. It's the most consistent, it builds world the best, introduced the best memes, and feels like an incredibly cohesive three film arc, particularly if you start considering Obi-Wan as protagonist and think of it as some tragic arc. Everyone sort of recognizes Revenge of the Sith as a good film, but the way all three of those films move is dynamic in a way that makes me absolutely mourn how blockbusters used to function.
And then we get to the sequel trilogy. It's definitely the most uneven of the whole lot. But in being uneven, you introduce variance. And in the case of the sequel trilogy, that means you get the highest highs (The Last Jedi is unquestionably the best entry in the entire franchise. Yes, I will explain that in another post. And no, your opinion does not supersede mine). But you also get the lowest lows: enter Rise of Skywalker.
The issue with this movie boils down to how everyone treated Episode VIII. It gave everyone cold feet on how to move forward because not only did Solo underperform at the box office, but it was also happening in the wake of the whole DC Universe thing crashing and burning which was happening alongside the Dark Universe failing to even launch. Studios were suddenly aware that their franchises, regardless of how big and produced they felt, might suck--financially and critically. And so, after all this happened and Disney also saw the shifting perspective of Trevorrow we witnessed one of the harshest pivots I've ever seen in a sequel. The Last Jedi works because of how it subverts expectation for how a second entry in a trilogy operates. So many plot threads were seemingly resolved. Luke is dead, Snoke is dead, Rey's parentage was revealed (and yes, her being nobody is much more interesting by a country mile). It set up the then theoretical Episode IX to be something entirely new because it seemed like it would be much more difficult to just be some retread of anything we'd seen before. And instead, Disney and Abrams and Kennedy seemed to get cold feet.
The Rise of Skywalker feels like two movies smashed into one. And so my biggest question becomes: if they were going to pivot this hard, why not just make two movies? You don't need to retcon anything. Just have the Skywalker Saga end not with a trilogy, but a quadrilogy. I mean, hell, even call it Rise of Skywalker Part 1 and Part 2 to keep it technically as a trilogy, a la Tarantino on Kill Bill. I doubt anyone would have really been upset they needed to go see another Star Wars movie in theaters. And it would have easily fixed the biggest issue in the finished product: the pacing.
I'm an editor. Pacing is something I'm always tracking and clocking. It's chief amongst any editor's concerns when piecing together the movie after everything is shot. And Rise of Skywalker's pacing isn't whack just because of how quickly it moves, but because of how many elements it introduces and then immediately moves on from. When Disney announced this was the end of the Skywalker Saga, I immediately assumed we'd see a long movie. I'm never really upset to have a theatrical experience like that either. And Disney themselves proved fans will turn out in droves to see long movies with Endgame, so when the runtime for Episode IX came in ten minutes shorter than Episode VIII, you could say I was confused. adding a half hour to this movie would remedy so many issues with it (although you should also excise everything Palpatine here too).
And it's weird because everyone's biggest echo was that the sequel trilogy felt so unsure of itself. And Disney had an opportunity to use everything set up in VII and VIII to prove that as absolutely false. There was a great thread running through the sequel trilogy that the old blood and old ways have a tendency to repeat the past mistakes and that rebellion and greatness can come from anyone. And they reneged on it. They had a great throughline of pushing the story out of realms we'd seen before: new lightsabers, new planet types, a side of the galaxy that had been to that point unexplored (Rose and the Codebreaker are such good characters because they are actual laypersons, two sides of just trying to see the next day). But instead we got a package where Rey's power only comes from her parentage, Kylo Ren gets a redemption because so did Vader, rogues who seem uninterested show up because they've got good hearts. And Rey just...chooses to claim Skywalker, despite being associated with both Vader and Kylo Ren?
Listen. If you look at The Rise of Skywalker in a more isolationist perspective, it's really not that bad. It's still a hell of a lot of fun and has some really great worldbuilding to it. I liked the idea of settlements. I liked seeing the aftermath of the Death Star crashing onto a planet. I liked the idea of a Sith homeworld (even though Palpatine shouldn't be there). It had a focus on adventuring that hasn't really been seen in the movies which are usually much more conflict based than exploratory. So there's things peppered throughout that seem to be less concerned with wrapping up the Skywalker Saga, and more with being a love letter to the franchise to show how much more juice it has in it. And I'm cool with all that. I think it does a good job at proving that it exists less as a series and more as a series set within an entire universe. It might put a bow on one massive story, but there's so much more to explore. It has a good mouth feel, if that makes sense.
It's a bit of a pity how much of this film is marred and stuck in making a gay character revel in trauma. It's a bit of a pity how his arc is literally only here to support and change a straight asshole. It's a bit of a pity how this film is completely wrapped up in a really confusing and inaccurate portrait of OCD that is just magically cured by love. It's a pity because on a moment to moment experience, As Good As It Gets can be pretty charming. But I was never really able to just get into this movie. For ever time I felt myself starting to vibe with the flow of it, I was pulled out by something. It's just kind of weird how this operates too because it almost seems self-aware about the creepiness of the whole central romance, but conveniently wants you to forget it by the end of the movie. Listen, I love Jack Nicholson as much as the next guy but the romance of this film is between a financially insecure waitress and a sugar daddy.
delicious. finally some good fucking food
Although it doesn't quite pull off its premise quite as handily as the film requires, I'd be shocked if anyone could do a better job at this than Waititi.
There's good laughs and genuine empathy created in a solid character arc. Waititi pulls good performances out of his ensemble. These kids were fantastic.
Fascinating topic, although the execution feels a bit wooden. Could have used some more stylistic flourishes to deviate away from an over-reliance on talking heads.
Stylistically it ends up being a bit of a mishmash of several other films that don't ever completely mesh together for me. There are visual and aural devices that are used for single scenes and never return.
Still quite a bit of fun, even if paced a little awkwardly.
Mesmerizing, spellbinding, and strange. Pattinson gives an absolutely breathtaking performance in a film so hazy and rich that I was on the edge of my seat. This is the type of film I can only hope to experience when I go to the theater. A journey into the psyche and into the weird.
I am on board with Eggers and wherever he wants to take us.
Not nearly as strong as the first film mostly because of how color by numbers it feels--while also being entirely too long. Bill Hader is EASILY the strongest part of the film though.
I'm not sure this is a very good movie and I think as far as how it sits within Nolan's filmography it's probably one of his weakest. But it's also the most Nolan of the bunch and as far as being judged as a statement of what he wants to do with the film, it honestly might be one of his best. But it's all about that perspective.
I had a massive headache watching this movie. It really fucked my brain in a way that really no other movie has since maybe Primer. And that's a big complement, I think. It's just a shame its wrapped up in an execution that feels more sterile than some of Nolan's set design.
It's really hard for me to rate this movie because it's difficult to judge a film that clearly is doing exactly what it wants to do, but what it wants to do is leave the audience by the wayside and deliver a pure experience. I kind of loved the experience, but I don't know that it's any good.
I'm very conflicted on Tenet, but I think that's kind of the point. Nolan, you son of a gun.
I'm convinced Kaufman should go back to being solely a screenwriter. He does not know how to keep his machinations in check. Spike Jonze's razor sharp edge cut to the core of his pretentiousness without losing the deeper meaning.
The cinematography is gorgeous and the performances are extremely good, but the film runs a half hour too long. It's mother! + Synecdoche, New York + incel fantasy.
I'm not really sure what the beef is with Paul WS Anderson and the film community, but I kind of think his movies are badass and a hell of a good time. I've been on record before as saying that we as an audience place too heavy of a reliance on story in a visual medium and I'll pull that card here again. Resident Evil: Retribution plays a lot like a video game but also just feels like a piece of visual art. I have a blast with these films, particularly the ones by PWSA.
Call me crazy, but I almost preferred this to Tarkovsky's. I don't know that I think it's better (I think it might as good), but if you were to ask me on a random day which version of Solaris I wanted to watch, I'd probably go with Soderbergh's.
From a filmmaking standpoint, it has always irked me a little bit how not cinematic Tarkovsky's can be. It's also pretty dry. Slimming down the runtime to less than 100 minutes, you get nearly the same impact of Tarkovsky's behemoth and don't lose a whole lot, in my opinion. I'm pretty big on Soderbergh so I might be a bit biased, but the way he frames things captivates me.
Bi Gan peaked into my subconscious and picked from my absolute favorite films, mixed them up, and sprinkled them into one of the most unique films I’ve ever seen.
This is a knockout. This is :asterisk_symbol::asterisk_symbol:it.:asterisk_symbol::asterisk_symbol:
Tragically underrated. When film begins to branch out into completely new styles, there's an element of purpose that comes alongside the quality of the execution. Desktop movies are not brand new--this isn't even the first of the series. But what Dark Web understands better than any other desktop movie I've seen (looking at you, Searching) is that this story would not work if it were made in any other format. It explores concepts of privacy through social media and the slippery slope of moral grayness within the digital age and it does so with the slightest level of cheesiness that makes for an incredibly engaging experience.
Bacon and Fishburne easily the strongest bits of this mediocre snooze fest. The writing here is stilted and melodramatic—doesn’t even seem to care enough about its red herring to cover it up to make the plot twist feel worth it. Editing is straight up laughable at times.
If you’re in the mood for a neo-noir set in Boston, Gone Baby Gone is a significant improvement.
A little overlong and relies a little too heavily on the music to tell the audience how to feel, but that does not altogether belie the ultimate heart of Waves. There is a great film hiding agonizingly close to this final cut--but I'm not sure that it quite hits. It does, however, contain genuine empathy and emotion.
