In the words of Benjamin Button, it’s never too late or too early.
The Barbie joke did cause a convo with two friends at dinner recently where one (from experience) vouched that it was actually great to watch The Godfather with me and get my color commentary during, so the three of us are planning to get together for a watch party full of my smug explanations after the holidays. Take that, Greta Gerwig.
Damn that sounds awesome. Hey look at Barbie still bringing people together for smug watch parties.
Most interest I have had in a movie in a long time is the Von Erich’s wrestling move by A24 called Iron Claw. I am all in.
Barbie was a really fun movie. I’m sure I didn’t get the nostalgia that people who actually had the dolls got, but I had a very good time watching that. Script was great, casting was A+. Hope it gets a Best Picture nomination; it deserves it.
It’s at least 99% certain be in the BP field. Seems like the only major category it stands a chance at actually winning is Gosling in supporting, but it seems likely to do well in nominations.
Heyyyy I stand by these three as great movies:
Can’t argue with the rest.
“At 42 years old, I woke up divorced and I had custody of [my] boys,” Oldman said. “That, in itself, was… that was hard because there was a shift in the industry where a lot of productions were being [filmed in] Hungary, Budapest, Prague, Australia, you know, all of these places. So, I turned down a lot of work.”
“Thank God for ‘Harry Potter,’” he said. “Thank God for ‘Harry Potter.’ I tell you, the two — ‘Batman’ and ‘Harry Potter’ — really, they saved me, because it meant that I could do the least amount of work for the most amount of money and then be home with the kids.”
Godzilla Minus One
I cried twice. In a fucking Godzilla movie. Hollywood needs to study this to see how to make a blockbuster.
Grade: B+
I remember seeing this in the theatre with my best friend. We were two white teens from a Midwestern white town, and we were absolutely blown away. Some experiences stick with you, and seeing this in the theatre is one of those…absolutely unforgettable. It was the first time I thought a film was truly robbed at the Oscars. An all time snub, IMHO.
Anyway, read this thread:
Still my favorite war movie pretty easily, and an excellent launching pad for Denzel. Definitely a joke that it wasn’t even nominated for Best Picture that year.
Pretty sure it’s fashionable these days to rip on Driving Miss Daisy, that year’s winner, but I liked it a lot. Still, Glory was better. Quite a year for Morgan Freeman.
Might be the only movie where I consider Broderick to be sincere in his acting.
Went straight to YouTube to see if somehow a person had clipped him saying “bastard!” and then covering his own mouth in The Cable Guy. Crestfallen to come up empty.
EDIT: that said, my search did lead me to the random discovery that Bob Odenkirk was in that movie during the porno password scene.
Only now seeing Killers of the Flower Moon, phenomenal. Deserves serious consideration as Scorsese’s best movie. Might be De Niro’s best performance. What an unbelievable year for movies.
New Godzilla movie had a budget of just $15 million. Hollywood is bloated and the rest of the world is going to start eating its lunch. Kids who grew up on anime in the 90s are middle-aged now, mainstream audiences are more and more willing to go see films from foreign studios. American studios are going to get blindsided. I really think Parasite winning an Oscar was a huge moment in movie history.
Been trying to dig around re: details about this, and it’s a bit difficult to verify anything solid. But if it’s indeed the case that labor wages and conditions being considerably worse is part of the equation, there would be reason to at least pump the brakes a bit on praising the makers of Godzilla Minus One for its overall budget relative to Hollywood budgets.
Did ‘Godzilla Minus One’ Just School Hollywood on Movie Making? (collider.com)
Also saw Godzilla Minus One tonight. Very good movie.
Reserved two seats online, but when we entered the theater, it seemed like either the row was labeled incorrectly based on the diagram we saw or I mistakenly tapped the wrong row. Seeing as nobody was there, we took the seats we wanted.
Watched the trailers, then the movie started and…Bradley Cooper was sitting at a piano. I told my wife we were in the wrong movie. Ticket taker told us the wrong theater. Got to the correct one and missed part of the opening scene.
Afterward, my wife said, “I didn’t know there was a movie about Leonard Bernstein, so I just thought the Godzilla movie started with someone at the piano and then he was going to get eaten.”
Well I know what movie Im making next
Hacksaw Ridge (rewatch)
8/10
Oscar bait, that is not Oscar worthy, but turns out to be a good movie. Andrew Garfield has a knack for playing all American religious types and somehow I don’t disbelieve that Vince Vaughn could be a drill sergeant so I take that as a win.
The Outpost (rewatch)
6/10
I read the book and a that makes the movie a big disappointment. Jake Tapper’s book was about how the slow accretion of bad but not terrible choices culminate in an output in the bottom of a valley with no road access and the only way in is through helicopter. It’s also about the uselessness of lone outposts in bumblefuck nowhere. The outpost would be peaceful when they paid off the locals and would get attacked when they didn’t and that state seesawed back and forth over time until the final assault by the Taliban.
The movie trades all that for a more rah rah war movie with lots of machismo. It’s still ok but overall a good book turns into a lower end run of the mill war movie
May December
9/10
Very well acted with a slight meta aspect of it. Overall I enjoyed it. The real story is even more fucked up than the movie though.
La La Land
8/10
I heard this movie was more of a Hollywood up its own ass about Hollywood, but I was surprised that it wasn’t so much that. Usually those up their own ass movies are all about the artifice and the glitz and glamour. This was really a story of young love and how you come together and grow apart, with a bit of old school Hollywood song and dance thrown in. Don’t think it deserved to be in the running for best picture though.
Did a Jackie Chan double feature this weekend
Wheels on Meals
Jackie Chan and his buddy have a food truck in Spain. The buddy’s dad is in an asylum, where the pair meet a cute girl who turns out to be a prostitute, who really turns out to be a missing heiress. There’s also a tertiary private eye character who eventually teams up with Jackie and co to save the prostitute/heiress. Overall this one doesn’t really hang together as a movie. You’re probably better off just watching the highlights on YouTube, especially the excellent fight between Jackie and Benny Urquida. It didn’t help that the version I watched was a bad dub in SD, but at least it was free.
The Foreigner
Jackie plays against type as an ex-special forces grieving father hell bent on revenge, a la late career Liam Neeson. He’s up against the IRA with Pierce Brosnan as the main antagonist. This has some decent action and fight scenes, but the stunts aren’t as big or as frequent as Jackie’s best work. It’s still a serviceable revenge thriller.
