Movies (and occasionally face slaps) (Part 2)

I just don’t like how he looks like one of those new rappers with the face tattoos. With a mix of Joker/Batman. Yeet!

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Kind of surprised they showed a guy getting shot in the face in a trailer.

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Don’t let Stephen King hear you say that

I know he hates it, and having read the book, I get it. Kubrick didn’t hesitate to twist it into his own thing, and I can imagine for an author it could be pretty insulting for someone to depart so far from what you wrote.

But all of that is whatever to me. I thought the book was fantastic too, and I ultimately just value both experiences.

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He looks stupid but he’s kinda supposed to look that way because this movie is for goth kids. The original looked dumb too.

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I’m still a book purist and with King on it, but he’s learned to let stuff like that go since. How else could he have been good with the adaptation of Under the Dome, which departed so hard and fast from the book for no discernible reason that I quit watching the show? Of course, by the end of the book, I wished I stopped reading it too.

King’s real gripe with the Kubrick version (which you probably already know) is that the book was semi-autobiographical and Kubrick portrayed the character as crazy vs. someone who was descending into madness. Maybe if there was some more nuance, King wouldn’t have been as upset as he was about it. He also couldn’t stand how Kubrick would call him with ‘creative’ conversations that were like nails on a chalkboard for him. His commentary on the endorsed miniseries gives some good anecdotes (the way he would say ‘Stan’ was very funny).

As an artistic work I obviously think the movie is great. As a representation of the book it was probably 1 star. I’m someone who’s never been able to divorce the two no matter how hard I try.

I was under the impression that post-Shining he had demanded to be directly involved in the creation of any future adaptation. If so, it’s entirely possible that he consented to any major departures that have happened over the years, and I wouldn’t expect any sort of public grievances like we had in the wake of that film’s release.

One Life

Pretty good movie. A bit thin and felt at times like what you saw with a movie like Sully, where a real event needed to be stretched out to constitute a feature-length story. Still, this story deserved to be told, and this film felt like a worthy tribute. We’re all lucky to have Anthony Hopkins continuing to stay so active as he gets on in years. This movie didn’t give him as much to chew on as some, but it’s still just a pleasure to watch him work.

3/5

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I enjoyed this. Blackberry is perfect for fans of The Social Network. Very well paced, funny, and almost believable about what really happened.

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In the documentary, Stormy—which comes out Monday on Peacock—there are many moments when Daniels seems to confront, bleakly, the absurdity of her situation. There is no playbook for an adult film actress who finds herself at the center of a political scandal involving the president of the United States, and Daniels, the documentary makes clear, hasn’t been reveling in her explosive fame and new jet-setting lifestyle since she became a public figure in 2018.

The audience, which likely will best remember the most outrageous and salacious moments of the largely Trump-era saga…may be surprised to hear that behind the scenes, Daniels felt like a victim.

I think your impression is partially true. I’m pretty sure one of the conditions of him getting to make his version of The Shining was that he had to stop slagging Kubrick’s version in public, which he did every chance he got. So in his commentary he instead kind of slagged Kubrick instead. He’s certainly involved in his adaptations now, but he was also involved in that one as far as I know. Kubrick basically just ignored everything King said and did whatever he wanted. I think Under the Dome was a pure cash grab and he didn’t care what they did to it.

I love Stephen King but he’s just being stubborn here. The movie is incredible, he’s just a hater.

In other news I have not seen this yet but put a pin in it: indie horror, Dastmalchian is always fantastic.

https://x.com/michaelroffman/status/1768827035839807958?s=20

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https://x.com/donwinslow/status/1769091729670709653?s=20

https://twitter.com/TSoS_/status/1768781764963475665?t=loSfZkM5xRUCz_nwPy2rew&s=19

https://twitter.com/DiscussingFilm/status/1769189565317697777

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Finally got around to a second go at this, and it landed way better for me. Not sure why it missed as badly as it did on first try. It didn’t launch its way into being an all-time personal favorite now necessarily, but it’s great.

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Ruffalo should have won. He was amazing in Poor Things.

In the film, set in 1977 and based on a true story, Cage plays Tony Kiritsis, a former real estate developer who put a dead man’s switch on himself and the mortgage banker who did him wrong, demanding $5 million and a personal apology.

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I’ve been wanting to see Cruising for a while, and now Criterion Channel has it. This is a 1980 William Friedkin neo-noir about a serial killer targeting New York City’s gay community, and it drew heavy criticism from the gay community at the time for its similarity to a real-life serial killer, plus the way it uses the gay subculture for shock/exploitation value.

I think there’s probably something to that. But putting politics aside, it’s a solid, very gritty noir procedural in the style of French Connection and Silence of the Lambs. Pacino has become kind of a meme but you see him in 1980 and you remember why he became such a big deal. Final scene has a fantastic ambiguous bit that I keep coming back to.

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