Last Movie You Saw, Name & Review Movie • Page 12

It's always intrigued me for that very reason

 

Main reason I watched it plus the car crash genre from the seventies has always been a genre I have enjoyed despite the lack of quality.

 

Just saw Jurrasic World. While it isn't a great piece of cinema it kept me entertained all the way through. Some of the dialogue was laughably bad and the director/writer really have no idea how to deal with female characters, giving one of the two the most unnecessarily long and drawn out deaths in the movie. I've heard the director is supposed to do episode 9 of Star Wars so it will be interesting to see what he does with a strong female lead.

 

I've seen a few movies over the last week or so

Hello, My Name is Doris was a wonderful time, Sally Field was excellent and the cast was full of great performers. Super warm and charming, just an excellent time.

Huntsman: the Winter's War I kind of liked in spite of many, many flaws. I wish it were better. It has a really charming Chris Hemsworth performance and if he and Jessica Chastain's relationship had been given more development early on it would have been strong. Emily Blunt and Charlize Theron are always excellent.

Pather Panchali was absolutely beautiful. Durga's character was so wonderful and the scene of her and Apu going to see the train and seeing power lines was a stunning sequence. I look forward to continuing with the Apu trilogy. Just a masterwork.

American Ultra was weird, mostly not in a good way, though I liked a lot about it and Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart gave much stronger performances than I'm sure they got credit for. There was a lot of good stuff in there, but the ending seemed to fly in the face of everything it was going for thematically.

The Invitation was very good. I don't want to say too much about it because, while I feel I enjoy most movies better the less I know about them going in, this in particular might be aided by that. I wrote about it a tiny bit in the film's thread.

 

Baskin was pretty weird and I had to rewatch it a day later to get past the confusing narrative continuity. It seems it's a film about nightmares and Hell, but besides that it's cryptic to the point in being indecipherable. Once I accepted that, I enjoyed it more, though like someone I'm the horror thread said I wish it did have as much substance as it does tone. I saw someone compare it to Hellraiser, which is a fair comparison, though that movie has a more clear story than this.

 

The God of Cookery was strange. Wasn't a huge fan though.

 

I really liked Pather Panchali, but it's the tiniest bit diminished by how much more I loved The World of Apu. What a fucking movie.

 

Everybody Wants Some!! was really, really good. I was just sitting there with a wide grin for two hours. I hope Linklater never stops working.

Finally saw The Foot Fist Way for the first time. Pretty funny, but didn't live up to the hype I had created in my own head. Everything those guys have done following has gotten better and better.

 

None of the movies I have watched over the last few weeks have compared to the way I am still shaken and pondering a video game called The Last of Us. It reminds me of the ways films like Synecdoche, New York or No Country for Old Men fundamentally changed me when I first became very serious about the art form.

 

Got to see that on the big screen from the latest restoration two summers ago and it was truly incredible. Made better by the fact I got to double feature it with a 35mm print of Renoir's The River.

 

oh man. I saw the whole trilogy on shitty VHS with white (why?!?!?) subtitles

Jealous

 

The Criterion edition of Pather Panchali was just unbelievably gorgeous looking. Wish I could see more of Ray's work in a theater setting though.

 

you thought the last of us was that good? I liked the game but I didn't get swept up like so many seem to be.

 

I really have not kept up with video games over the last fifteen years or so, so I do not know how it compares to things like Mass Effect, Uncharted, Journey, Halo, Bioshock, and so many others.

The Last of Us is very obviously heavily indebted to the films it borrows from, mainly Children of Men, 28 Days Later, and The Road. It does not try to hide this; the framework of a grieving and disillusioned father taking an immune young girl to a hope for humanity is identical to Children of Men, and Tess stands in for the Julianne Moore character. The charismatic cannibal is directly lifted from the Garret Dillahunt character from The Road. The urban setting, the military zones, and the new-style fast zombie comes from 28 Days Later. It is not a strikingly original work when you compare it to another art form.

In fact, if The Last of Us was a film, it would be a good and well-made genre film, but with little else. However, it is hard to determine how fair it is to compare these two things. Can the heights of video games be compared to the heights of recent films, like The Tree of Life or Boyhood? Maybe there are video games out there that try something similar, but the fact that it is an interactive medium requires some sort of action or forward motion that a Bela Tarr or Federico Fellini film does not need.

Even with these shortcomings, the game announces itself as being equivalent to film: the smash cut opening with a bold announcement of title, the way the camera lingers at more subdued moments, and the abrupt ending. The ending itself is something that seems bold and exciting in the video game world even if it is something cinephiles would be used to, an ending that is both unclear and a rejection of goal-oriented gaming.

From what I can tell, video game criticism is even more of an embarrassment than film writing, but the few interesting pieces I have been able to read suggest that a lot of people struggled with the moral decision to kill the doctors at the end and whether or not that would make Joel the villain of the story. It is a little bit more complex than that; Joel was never a hero in the first place, as we see him kill subdued hostages even after they do not pose a threat and he was working as a smuggler. It gets into deeper human emotions, specifically if we allow our personal bonds to nudge out the greater good. More interestingly, in the game you are basically a failure at your mission, and nothing has changed in the world. Joel may have a surrogate daughter, but he is older and with literal and figurative wounds that may never heal. Ellie is psychologically scarred from the David incident, and now the only man she trusts is refusing to tell her the truth. It is hard to imagine a game where Princess Peach is dead and Mario cannot beat Bowser, or the protagonist of the latest Grand Theft Auto game is gunned down by the opponent. The feeling I cannot shake is how unimportant I was as a player; in video games you are almost always a messiah or someone who makes huge changes to the world around you.

I have read conversations about a film version being made, but hopefully that never happens. It would be flawed even if it was done correctly, and there is a definitive narrative already available.

 

Everybody Wants Some

The more I watch Linklater, the more I think about the idea of movement in his films. Obviously Slacker is the prime example in terms of movement, with the camera literally jumping from one character to the next and never returning; however, I had a conversation a month or so ago about how Dazed is constantly in motion. No setpieces are repeated, characters flow from one interaction to another, crossing paths, dodging others. Both Dazed and EWS (and Boyhood, to an extent) are films on the precipice. They're films about minor, seemingly meaningless movements within the lives of the characters who are on the verge of something bigger. I'm very close to a coherent thought regarding why that aspect his films sticks out to me so much, but I'm at a loss for the moment.

Anyway, I really loved EWS. Wyatt Rusell's character is the one that I really need to sleep on, in terms of his dialogue and character arc (if you'd call it that in a Linklater film); however, Glenn Powell was the clear standout for me. As with other Linklater films, the main character was the most emotionless, boring character. I suppose at this point it's a conscious decision so that the viewer can project themselves into the situation over the blank slate that is the main character. I was not as in love with the soundtrack of this film as I was with Dazed, but there were some highlights. Overall, I honestly feel like I enjoyed this film more than Boyhood and can see it getting worn out when I can have a physical copy around me. Comfort food film.

EDIT:
I'm also unsure if Linklater will ever go back to this well again, and that kind've saddens me

 

got to see all three Apu movies at the theater last Fall and it was quite the experience. Pather Panchali is my favorite

 

Not sure if there's a better place for this article, but it's a good read on the frustrating and daunting climate for small films (even if the article is a touch too dismissive of the reality of a film critic's job: they have to write about the films people can see to get readers). Very happy to see it mention An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, a really tremendous film.

Our Dated Model of Theatrical Release Is Hurting Independent Cinema - The New Yorker

 

okay now that i've sat on it for a bit

Everybody Wants Some - 6/10

I've gone back and forth to how I feel about this movie. On one hand, it has the simple, very normal aura that a Linklater movie has. It's light-hearted, it's enjoyable, the conflict is non-existent, and I guess I somewhat appreciated the throwback feel in EWS. I was hoping that by giving it time, more and more scenes would stick out in my mind, and I would finally realize that the movie was sorta beautiful, but there just weren't enough of those scenes to overcome the many faults I had with this movie. I didn't find our characters to be particularly interesting first and foremost. Our main character was blank canvas white bread, and that could be on purpose, as maybe Linklater wants us to project ourselves onto him, but that's really hard to do when he's a super attractive, perfect, athletic white guy that everyone likes. Linklater LOVESSSSS having very little conflict in his movies, it's one of the things that I always struggle with, but this movie took it too far. Watching a cast of jocks go from party to party having fun, having no issues, and just existing wasn't interesting to watch. Is that what the first weekend of college is like? Sorta. Sometimes. Not always. So I can't even give it credit for that. Our cast felt really stocky too. They felt like 80s cliches, and if they really existed in Linklater's life that's fine, but unfortunately they've become cliches so it hurts.

I'm just not buying this movie. It feels like Linklater wanted to look back fondley at his college life, and wanted us to come along for the ride, but in the end it just wasn't interesting enough of a journey. Just a series of party scenes. Sometimes these movies can have underrated in between scenes, but this movie didn't nearly have enough of these to make it worth it. LOVEEDDD the split-screen telephone convo. I even loved the montage's of competition of day to day life of male jocks...it was normal and not over the top. Awesome. But that's really all I got. The "lessons" of the movie are too basic for me.

With that said. It's not a bad movie.

 

Everybody Wants Some is about searching for identity within masculinity, painted against a context of many masculine ideals being fleeting. The parties weren't purely supposed to be fun, there's literally a ticking clock until they "end", amidst the ending of summer and the transition from high school (where Jake mentions he was the best on his team) to college (where Jake mentions that they were all the best on their high school teams, and now they need to do more and find a new identity). There were a bunch of different aspects to who they were and how masculinity manifests itself in so many different ways and can be fluid and doesn't have to be confined, even though we often feel like we have to label our specific brand of it and wear it loudly. The more I think about the movie the more I love it.

(of course, it's about a lot of other things too, not just what I mentioned, but that's what I came away feeling the most)

 

Everybody Wants Some is very subversive, much in the same vein as Dazed and Confused. It is a companion piece to Boyhood, but instead of the macro scale of a young man's life it is a micro look at the introduction to the college experience. It is a much darker film than is readily obvious; the 30 year old man pretending to be in college, the realization that only two players on the team are likely to turn professional, the inability of the men to even admit that their major might be important given their unlikelihood of making it into Major League Baseball. It is representative of college-as-purgatory.

 

Lemonade is the best film of the year

 

Captain America: The Winter Soldier - 9/10

I hope Civil War is as good if not better than this, these films are easily the more consistent of the Marvel character films. Here is hoping Civil War doesn't suffer from third film syndrome.

Insidious - 7.5/10

Even though I rarely find a horror film scary (this being another one) I just find it so entertaining from not only the typical thrills side but also in terms of the technical ingenuity involved as the sound design, imagery, score and camera work are all entertaining to watch in their own right.

 

Eh. I'm glad you guys liked EWS so much, I just, I guess I didn't think Linklater did a good job of relaying those themes and messages to me then. At least, not in a memorable way.

 

The Big Short - 8.5/10

I liked this. I'm a big fan of these wall street, corruption movies, and I think Big Short really nailed it. All of the players involved were really fascinating, I was on the edge of my seat, and well.... i learned something? Loved the way it was directed, the acting was spot on, and I think this was way better than Spotlight. Really upsetting ending though, I mean, what the fuck i'm so mad!

 

Captain America: Civil War - 9.5/10

Was expecting this at best to be disappointing (with the last two being solid) and at worst be a mess (with all the characters involved) and thankfully it was neither. The cast is top notch with Black Panther being introduced (who I wasn't familiar with but thoroughly enjoyed nonetheless) and Tom Holland as Spider-Man really held his own, was tentative about how he would go down but he impressed especially alongside all the other superheroes we already know. The action was also stellar, mixing in once again big spectacle and close hand to hand combat brilliantly (something I find the Captain America films to do better than other Marvel entries) and along with handling all the characters really well it deals with the themes really well too. It is also highly entertaining, funny and even though the characters do toil one another for screen time it isn't all that jarring for me. It also didn't outstay its welcome for me (some people have felt it to be too long) and the score was as rousing as usual. Really, really impressed.