I couldn’t make it to the keyboard fast enough.
Glass Onion:
Bron torched the napkin, but he still could have been implicated by the envelope, right? Seems like they made up a bunch of stuff to nail Bron while forgetting that the envelope was still intact.
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What I mean is that the performances in Usual Suspects are enough to make me want to rewatch it, even though I know how it ends. I just don’t feel that strongly about The Sixth Sense (or a few other M Night films)
Sixth Sense is a fun rewatch so you can look for all the hints and examine how the characters act now that you know the twist.
What do you get out of movies you like that you can’t get out of a Wikipedia article?
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The Usual Suspects is difficult to enjoy knowing both the director and star have sexually assaulted numerous underage boys.
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I tend to enjoy character-driven narratives more than plot-driven ones, with lots of exceptions I suppose
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Well, yes, this is a different matter
That makes sense.
I guess I’d say the same but would include Sixth Sense in those character-driven narratives.
Examples of one vs the other for your tastes?
Deleted Glass Onion post b/c it looks like the spoiler tags d/n work
This is just like my opinion, but my opinion is that you can almost definitively remove Singer’s name from the Usual Suspects and give full credit to the unsung hero of every franchise his pen touches: Christopher McQuarrie
McQuarrie won an Oscar for that screenplay. He’s still churning out one mega hit script after another.
Bryan Singer, meanwhile, is not only facing a history of abuse toward underage boys, he also has an established history of being either coked out of his goddamn mind or absent from the set entirely.
It’s important to keep in mind that while an auteur’s name will be used to market a movie, a director is just one tiny piece in a massive production. The look of it is due to the cinematographer. The story is due to the script. The performances are due to the actors. Etc etc etc.
Whatever part Bryan Singer played in the success of the movies he directed, history shows his contributions were vanishingly small.
Well, some good character-driven films I’ve seen include The Whale for example…or Fences w/ Denzel & Viola Davis, Glengarry Glen Ross, American Beauty, Boyhood, No Country for Old Men, The Wrestler, The Breakfast Club. Most films based on plays fall into this category. Basically any good film with “too much talking” as my kid says heh.
Good plot-driven films for my money include: The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), The Hunt for Red October, Memento, The Manchurian Candidate, Inception, Oceans 11, Mad Max Fury Road, The Big Short.
I could add to both lists for days, these are not intended to be all-inclusive.
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Good thing the usual suspects isn’t a particularly good movie anyways.
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It’s gotten more value as a meme than a movie.
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Have you seen The Way of the Gun? It was McQuarrie’s first movie as director and it kinda flopped hard. He didn’t write or direct anything else until Cruise basically brought his career back from the dead (I assume there’s some Scientology connection). I keep trying to get other people to watch that movie because I think it’s really good and deserves more appreciation than it gets.
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These callouts always seem arbitrary to me.
Where do you draw the line?
idk, but the very recent revelations of two abusers and dozens of underage victims is on the wrong side of it.
So you feel the same way about hip hop?
That kind of a random question. The only hip hop artist I can think of with a bunch of underage sex charges is R. Kelly, who I never listened to anyway.