Movies We've Seen Recently

[Pavlova]

It's the International Film Festival in my neck of the woods at the moment, so I've seen seven movies in the cinema in about eight days? (I'm going a little mad, mind.)

Searching: John Cho uses the internet to find his missing daughter. Told entirely through a computer screen. Actually a pretty solid film - the drama's good, and it doesn't fall into the traps that films like Unfriended did.

Thelma: Norweigan lesbian thriller. Kinda bad, but beautifully shot. The whole thing had some weird subtext that I didn't particularly like, but it was a good concept.

Our New President: Terribly put together documentary made entirely out of Russian pro-Trump propaganda. It was fascinating, but edited badly enough that there was no coherent point to everything.

I also saw the Miseducation of Cameron Post (great and heartbreaking), Climax (fuckin weird) and Disobedience (probably my favourite so far).

Mission Impossible 6 was fabulous too - just lots of fun and utterly ridiculous. Tom Cruise is very weird but he's damn good at what he does.

[ikaribattousai]

Mission Impossible 6 was fabulous too - just lots of fun and utterly ridiculous. Tom Cruise is very weird but he's damn good at what he does.

The motorcycle chase in that movie had me pumped like nothing I've seen in a long time.

[Shell Game]

i watched Citizen Kane again last night, this time with someone pretty special, and our chat led to all kinds of observations i had never made before

so much attention to detail. it's a very good movie no matter what you think of the hype. one might even say

It's TERRIFIC!

[chai tea latte]

Mission Impossible Fallout ruled. Some awesome set pieces, and Tom Cruise is back at the top of his game. I think I would rank the Mission Impossible movies this way: 4, 6, 5, 1, 3, 2.

I saw Mamma Mia: Here it Goes Again with my mom which I think is the best way to see that movie. I enjoyed it a lot, there's good singing and funny jokes and lots of cute boys. A bunch of the songs were kind of deep cuts which was interesting but you got what you're looking for with regards to classic hits as well. Amanda Seyfried plays both herself in the present and her mother in the past and she doesn't even really change her hair when she does it so it's very confusing in my opinion to know whether the movies supposed to be happening in 2018 or the 1980s. The way they did Waterloo was very cute in my opinion.

xXx: the Return of Xander Cage: I wanted to see this one when it came out, because I love the idea of the action movie franchise where the hero skateboards and rides Razor scooters. The first one is really fun! Anyway, this movie was extremely paid for by the US military and Chinese tourism. There's a scene where Ruby Rose and Vin Diesel meet Donnie Yen at a Chinese restaurant, and they all speak Chinese and drink Chinese beer and say cheers in Chinese. There's also a scene where the gadgets girl (who is bisexual and sells weed) shows off a power armor glove that lets you punch really fast and really hard by saying that it's an actual US military secret project and rattles off a little bit more about the US military technology division. Not very subtle, but there was a lot of propaganda going on so I'll give it a point anyway for making me laugh. The bad guys in the movie are anarchists who want to destroy the MacGuffin because no one should have access to that much power, and the good guys are the CIA, at least initially. A weird experience overall, and I don't know that I would recommend it unless you also watched the first xXx movie as a teen like I did.

[ikaribattousai]

xXx: the Return of Xander Cage: I wanted to see this one when it came out, because I love the idea of the action movie franchise where the hero skateboards and rides Razor scooters. The first one is really fun! Anyway, this movie was extremely paid for by the US military and Chinese tourism. There's a scene where Ruby Rose and Vin Diesel meet Donnie Yen at a Chinese restaurant, and they all speak Chinese and drink Chinese beer and say cheers in Chinese. There's also a scene where the gadgets girl (who is bisexual and sells weed) shows off a power armor glove that lets you punch really fast and really hard by saying that it's an actual US military secret project and rattles off a little bit more about the US military technology division. Not very subtle, but there was a lot of propaganda going on so I'll give it a point anyway for making me laugh. The bad guys in the movie are anarchists who want to destroy the MacGuffin because no one should have access to that much power, and the good guys are the CIA, at least initially. A weird experience overall, and I don't know that I would recommend it unless you also watched the first xXx movie as a teen like I did.

I saw Skyscraper a little while back and it was also made for the Chinese market in a very obvious way.

[Nikaer Drekin]

Amanda Seyfried plays both herself in the present and her mother in the past and she doesn't even really change her hair when she does it so it's very confusing in my opinion to know whether the movies supposed to be happening in 2018 or the 1980s.

Granted, I only saw the trailers for this, but wasn't her mom in the past played by Lily Collins?

[chai tea latte]

Amanda Seyfried plays both herself in the present and her mother in the past and she doesn't even really change her hair when she does it so it's very confusing in my opinion to know whether the movies supposed to be happening in 2018 or the 1980s.

Granted, I only saw the trailers for this, but wasn't her mom in the past played by Lily Collins?

maybe? It was really difficult for me to tell the difference.

E: Saw Ashik Kerib (1988) last night. Traditional Azeri fairy tale about a traveling minstrel and love with a really cool soundtrack of mostly indigenous folk music and some really cool electronic-sounding stuff. Cool visuals, gonna check out more by the same director.

[Spenny]

I finally saw Infinity War. If you put a gun to my head and asked me to come up with the funniest thing imaginable, I absolutely would never have possibly come up with 50 foot tall Peter Dinklage. It was a very fun movie, too.

[ikaribattousai]

Saw Blackkklansman and it was very, very good.

[Cleretic]

I wanted to like Avengers Infinity War. Especially when I slowly realized that it was essentially an entire movie of that stereotypical Star Trek scene where Worf gets tossed aside to show you how dangerous the alien of the week is; I am surprisingly okay with the idea of just watching two hours of superheroes getting chumped, once I made peace with the notion about fifteen minutes in that yes, that's just all this movie is.

But it kinda fucks up by essentially making a special effects spectacle with barely any interesting or new special effects. The telekinetic alien had some cool moments, and Doctor Strange and Spider-Man got to stretch their powers in interesting new ways, but other than that everyone's just flexing muscles we were already abundantly familiar with... except in one scene, where the idea of a Worf Effect Movie teams up with interesting new special effects and sells itself so well that it made the rest of the movie worse by comparison to me.

The scene of Thanos getting and showing off the Reality Stone is so stunning, terrifying and weird that it sets this really amazing bar for the rest of the movie; that this guy is so thoroughly beyond everything that nobody has a chance to even touch him without a damn good plan. But he never uses the Reality Stone in a fight again, opting instead for much more conventional telekinesis and energy blasts, which is a whole lot less stunning and unscalable, and essentially the whole rest of the movie outside of that one scene is Superhero Punchmans. I actually suspect that one scene was written and/or directed by somebody else entirely, because it stands so far apart from everything else that  it feels like it's a pivotal scene from a very different--and better--movie.

[chai tea latte]

Here is a review of two very controversial comedy specials:

Hannah Gadsby's "Nanette"

This is an interesting one-woman play. People have observed that it isn't very funny; and it isn't. The jokes are mostly clustered before the turn, around 20 minutes in, where Gadsby reveals that she's quitting comedy, that this is her last standup special, and speaks frankly about her rape and identity as a queer woman. It's a one-woman play disguised as a comedy special, and that's pretty exciting to comedy heads, but it's not really that great as an actual piece of media, even if it's cool conceptually. Oops! Points for effort.

the HBO Drew Michael special, directed by Jerrod Carmichael

Drew Michael delivers an extremely specific, personal, and asshole-ish set about how he's been told that he's an asshole but doesn't really get why, and self-diagnoses his problems incorrectly. It's his touring set - he does an hour - but Jerrod Carmichael shoots the whole thing without an audience or laughter, in sets like an airplane hangar painted totally black. In interludes between his material, Drew talks to a hot British woman named Suki Waterhouse, who's really infatuated with him. It's implied that they're calling each other over FaceTime, but they're shot standing next to each other on a featureless stage. The ending is good.

I'm seeing a lot of very funny people say pretty mean things about this on Twitter. I think there are two reads of this movie, and that mine is correct. I'll explain them below:
A lot of people are saying Drew Michael is a sociopath and that if this is what reinventing comedy looks like they're not interested. This is facile, because as I will explain below, it isn't Drew Michael's special. It's Jerrod Carmichael's.

Carmichael has done interviews about the special where he says he saw Drew Michael on the road and says that something about Drew's voice drew him in. I think this is a joke at Drew's expense. Actually, I think the entire special is a joke at Drew's expense, and it's exactly because he's so prototypical of a kind of bad standup comic that Jerrod chose to shoot his set for the special he had in mind. The end, where he has an argument with Suki, is more or less Jerrod Carmichael's artist's statement. And it is art, I think. Make up your own mind; someone uploaded it to youtube:

[chai tea latte]

seen it recently:

Master of the Flying Guillotine: Extremely good. Wang Yu returns as the One-Armed Boxer and we have both a really baller international martial arts tournament and some great set pieces. Aside from the brownface and Wang Yu's bad hand-to-hand skills it's basically perfect.

The Circle: adaptation of a Dave Eggers novel I read when I was like 20? I liked it then so I watched the movie. lots and lots of stars, feel like this is supposed to be awards bait? The end was a cop-out and felt totally unjustified and John Boyega's character doesn't really make sense. Emma Watson is pretty in it though so 3/5 stars

A Hologram for the King: Another Eggers adaptation of something I liked a couple of years ago. I got maybe half an hour into this before I decided to stop watching. Tom Hanks seemed good in it though.

Duel to the Death: more excellent wuxia. Ninjas on kites is good as hell and the final scene is famous for good reason. Worth a watch even if you don't like the genre.

Ghost in the Shell (the first movie): yeah it's still extremely good also. Beautiful art, strong message that still resonates. I mentioned to my roommate that I had just watched it again and he said 'yeah ScarJo is really hot in it' and I lost a little bit of respect for the guy to be honest. I saw it with subs originally and the dub is good too.

Train to Busan: finally saw this and yes it's very good, like every kept saying it is. The zombies were scary, the setting ruled, and the characters felt real. 5/5

Xavier Dolan's mother!: this was not fun to watch and it was maybe ten minutes too long. 4/5

[Turtle]

Ghost in the Shell (the first movie): yeah it's still extremely good also. Beautiful art, strong message that still resonates. I mentioned to my roommate that I had just watched it again and he said 'yeah ScarJo is really hot in it' and I lost a little bit of respect for the guy to be honest. I saw it with subs originally and the dub is good too.

When the live action movie was coming out, a theater in Orlando had a limited run of the original movie. The following is a beat-by-beat summary, as far as I can remember it, of the advertisements:

• Intro - The Major walks down a hall - 60 seconds of Live Action Trailer
• Some arbitrary movie
• Some arbitrary movie
• A different, shorter Live Action trailer
• Some arbitrary movie
• Intro - The Major walks down a hall - 60 seconds of the exact same first trailer
• The Major but in CGI, the first trace of there being an animated version of the movie we are about to watch - Oh it's a mobile game
• Intro - The Major walks down a hall - Tricked you, this one transitions to being about behind the scenes footage

I swear I about died when I thought I was going to watch the same movie trailer three times in 10 minutes.

[chai tea latte]

Steel Rain (2017, netflix)
Korean action-thriller about a coup in North Korea. The DPRK's "Number One" is presumed to be killed, but he's actually clinging to life after being rescued by a North Korean spy. There's a lot of great fight scenes and a lot of the movie is about nuclear missiles. I would hate to spoil it, it's very good. Jung Woo-Sung, who plays the North Korean spy, was outstanding in both the written and action scenes. I enjoyed the hell out of it, very fun.

The Last Witch Hunter (2015, vin diesel)
Vin Diesel made a movie about his D&D character, an immortal 800 year old witch hunter with a sword that catches fire. It's set in the present day and has a bizarrely-famous cast (Rose Leslie, Michael Caine, Elijah Wood, Isaac de Bankholé) for what's essentially a vanity movie (Vin wrote, directed, and starred). Also a lot of fun!

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014, marvel)
People told me that there were a couple good MCU movies - Thor: Ragnarok, Black Panther, and Winter Soldier - and every single person who told me this is a fake friend. This movie fucking sucked. When the plot briefly gets interesting 45 minutes in, the movie takes painstaking aims to reveal that actually, all the moral depth and complexity was just for show, entirely fake. A Nazi did it! The buddy cop thing between Cpt America and the Hawkeye guy is not compelling, the action scenes are anemic at best, full of shakycam and quick cuts, and for a movie that wants to present itself as a nuanced approach to the problem of fascism, it's a goddamn joke. Thor: Ragnarok was good. Black Panther was good. This sucked, stay away.

[Don Konky Dong]

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014, marvel)
People told me that there were a couple good MCU movies - Thor: Ragnarok, Black Panther, and Winter Soldier - and every single person who told me this is a fake friend. This movie fucking sucked. When the plot briefly gets interesting 45 minutes in, the movie takes painstaking aims to reveal that actually, all the moral depth and complexity was just for show, entirely fake. A Nazi did it! The buddy cop thing between Cpt America and the Hawkeye guy is not compelling, the action scenes are anemic at best, full of shakycam and quick cuts, and for a movie that wants to present itself as a nuanced approach to the problem of fascism, it's a goddamn joke. Thor: Ragnarok was good. Black Panther was good. This sucked, stay away.

Say what you will about Marvel movies, moral depth and complexity isn't their strong suit. But that elevator scene, tho...

I saw MI:6 recently and was tickled to hear newer versions of the classic music from the old TV show. That, and Tom Cruise continues to work best in a team dynamic, imo.

Did anyone see Upgrade during its short run? That was definitely my favorite film of the summer, though Won't You Be My Neighbor and Eight Grade were close.