Heck yeah this movie is going to be bananas.
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Yeah, these updates are not doing good things for my enthusiasm for this movie.
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My one note of hope is that the early screenings for Fight Club were disastrous. No one understood why the movie would connect with audiences once it was live. Maybe something similar happens here 
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The idea someone would make a huge budget film with their money and genuinely not care about its market appeal at all is so confusing to insiders I am not putting a ton of weight on the early reactions.
If itâs bananas itâs sounds like that is by design not poor craftsmanship.
I canât wait.
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Welcome to the Wonderful World of Francis Ford Coppola
Fresh off the momentum of my glorious first viewing of Harakiri, I figured I would run with it and watch another consensus all-time classic of Japanese cinema, Kurosawaâs High and Low.
This film divides pretty clearly into two parts: a crisis in the first half and a police procedural in the second half. The first half of this movie is incredible. The intensity of the situation, the impossibility of the POV characterâs spot, the perfect execution of all of the actors involvedâŚI was pretty blown away.
The police procedural half wasâŚgood. But I canât lie, it really lost a decent amount of momentum in this sequence, with some scenes that felt downright tedious. Like, Iâm sure it was all really competently executed, and in no way am I against watching men talking in rooms and conducting an investigation (Fincherâs Zodiac is fantastic), but it just felt like it got away from what had locked me in during the first half. Weâre no longer looking through the eyes of someone facing a horrible quandary; now weâre just engaging with an aftermath that I couldnât find a way to care as much about.
I will say that, based on the first half alone, this is a Kurosawa film that absolutely worked for me, and I sort of suspect that on eventual rewatch I might warm up to this half that Iâm giving such a lukewarm reaction to. Because again, it wasnât in any way bad; I think I was just dealing with disappointed over what it wasnât. When I go in next time knowing that itâs going to completely refocus in the way that it does, I might end up thinking the whole thing is a stone-cold masterpiece. As is, I give it a 4/5, and a fairly high 4/5 at that.
In related news: there are classics that shouldnât be remade, but Iâm actually very optimistic about the Spike Lee/Denzel Washington A24 remake that weâre apparently going to be getting. I think this story lends itself to something that could be modernized with its own spin that justifies its existence.
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I loved all of those movies but havenât seen them in a really long time. Steve Zissou Life Aquatic or something was one you didnât mention.
I thought about recommending that one when you asked about Kurosawa movies. Itâs great but kind of a slow burn, glad you dug it.
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I havenât seen it. But itâs next up.
Just saw late night with the devil, liked it a lot, like the style, suspense, originality
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Excited to see this one
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Yea I like life aquatic, tenenbaums, moonrise kingdom, Budapest, asteroid and Henry sugar.
Never could make it through fantastic Mr fox
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Do most people here not like Fury Road? To me it was pretty much the perfect action movie. Admittedly a genre I almost never watch anymore, so I might not be the best judge.
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I would LOVE to tell you that the answer is yes. But no.
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Fury Road has a 97 on RT. the lack of love for it by some on here is atypical imo. itâs an excellent movie and is definitely rewatchable, esp if you havenât seen it in a while
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Iâd say most like it but the people that donât like are the ones mentioning it every week.
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Only saw it on the big screen when it came out and felt blown away in a similar way to Dune (not that theyâre directly comparable). Definitely sounds like itâs time for a rewatch!
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You follow the AI controversy? People are pissed it used some AI generated images for the interstitials.
Itâs crappy that they used AI on some of the cuts (apparently; I havenât seen it yet, but would if they brought it to my usual theater), but I canât bring myself to buy into the sentiment from some that the answer is for people to refuse to give it their business.
Really feels like itâs a matter of a smaller studio getting caught with its hand in the cookie jar where bigger studios have likely slipped it past us already and will continue to with the aid of better resources. Iâm very glad that the writers and actors held out for anti-AI protections, which should for now protect us from the worst offenses.
I am happy that this got highlighted and that the studio had to go through a negative media cycle over it, but there are no easy solutions here. A small-time production like this necessarily includes the hard work of a lot of people who were not to blame for the studioâs corner-cutting, and my reaction just isnât to want to participate in a collective effort to cause the work to fail.
I am fully understanding of the other side of this debate though. I do hate how inevitable this particular evolution feels.
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