Yeah i think this is it, if i said his name to non movie nerds most wouldn’t know it but he’s in a lot of good stuff.
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It’s a beautiful day in NYC after the rain cleared, and I’m on my way to see Civil War. Gonna get a big bag of popcorn because if I’m going to be harrowed, I might as well have snacks.
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You can’t bank on Plemons to open a movie to good business if he’s in top billing…
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Speaking of unlikely trajectories. Landry pursuing an attractive classmate was a comedic storyline (at least until it wasn’t) because of how unrealistic it was at about the same time that she was Mary Jane. Safe to say that I didn’t have them getting married on my bingo card.
Hes not a star, but he’s one of the best 3rd/4th billing guys going right now.
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see, articles like this are gonna annoy me bc they’re pontificating about a 2024 US civil war, which is what i and most everyone else was looking forward to. and we got… a photographer movie?
from the article: “The film is light on battlefield set-pieces and CGI explosions, spends scant time with government figures — and barely touches on political issues. Its main villains are insurgents who dot the war-torn landscape and exercise power, not to any greater end, but simply because they can.”
even a movie about that would be awesome. this just felt like “here’s some dead people swinging from a rope on the way to DC!”.
this was my text to a buddy an hour ago:
“seriously? awful wtf. i feel like i was sold a bill of goods. no background on anything, okay fine you don’t want to make a sweeping, macro-view civil war movie. but when you decide to focus on scenes and making the viewer care about the characters, don’t spend 2 whole minutes where the longest line is 2 syllables.
invasion of dc was cool, guns/bombs go boom. pit of regretful choices/mass grave was… who fuckin’ knows bc apparently they were just props with no backstory.
fat old main character dies: 
female main character dies: , but at least the girl got the shot!!
this was a war photographer movie. shit had nothing to do with a civil war, and for your viewing pleasure: another 3 minutes of a creepy 50-year old grunting broken english at an 18-year old before bedtime.
if i put a gun to this movie’s head and asked if it had any last words, it would probably look at the director and say, “please don’t let them kill me”.”
the explosion was cool, the gunshots were loud, and i would rather be tortured to death in anonymity than have my last words, being recorded by reuters, be begging and crying. those were my takeaways.
also, lemme go down wearing my PRESS helmet to chat with the guys with AR-15’s and 100 bodies in a mass grave 15 feet away 
i understand most of my disappointment is that i was expecting a different movie. but i was expecting a different movie bc that’s what was advertised.
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I don’t think that’s what they advertised at all. It’s just what people expected. That’s not the same thing.
Also your line about them wearing helmets at the mass grave is literally what war photographers do every day. That why so many have died in Ukraine and Gaza.
I thought it was pretty effective that it took me a while to figure out if one of the scenes was a flashback for K Dunst or in the film’s present day America
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if war correspondents are casually sauntering up to people actively tossing the 80th body into a ditch and following an armed squad of marines around a blind corner under fire holding their cameras like weapons, god bless ‘em.
i admit i wanted more of a political war movie on a grand scale, i probably did take what i wanted to see from the trailers… but you’re saying my own plot disappointments aside, this was still a good movie? like, you gave a shit what happened?
It’s not only good, it’s great. Story aside it is genius film making. Fair if you didn’t get hooked by the story but I found it pretty engrossing save the weak final act.
I really do think people need to stop the trend of reviewing films by what they wish they were. It’s the only form of art that gets graded this way and it doesn’t make any sense.
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So let me tell you about music…
I don’t follow music as closely but people say they wish X song was faster or the lyrics were different? I hear people say they wish records were more like old ones I guess but that’s not really the same thing.
Maybe I’m not understanding what you’re getting at, but doesn’t most art get reviewed like this?
People constantly wish albums by bands/groups/artists are different than what was released. People want to hear it differently, want different sounds, etc. You name it, the consumer has put it on music. It’s saying that music is definitely an art form that carries expectations and desires to do something differently than what was done very frequently, just like movies.
I’m kind of answering for him but I think his gripe is that he believes you should watch a movie in a vacuum (no trailer, no knowledge, etc.) and review it as an independent piece of art. For a movie like this, people are going in with the expectation that it will choose a side. It’s infuriating for a lot of people when movies don’t do this when talking about such hot button topics. Sicario played immigration similarly but didn’t face anywhere near the criticism a movie like this has.
The Flash was panned because Ezra Miller was in it in many reviews, not because of the standalone merits of the film. If Ezra hadn’t been Ezra, The Flash likely would have been a big hit, but Ezra being Ezra throughout the production of that film basically killed it. And by the time the movie was about to come out, Warner thought they maybe had a hit after all the bad publicity after getting a big bounce after the Super Bowl teaser trailer. They were very very wrong, despite the movie having more than enough artistic merit to be successful.
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I’m not sure I agree with that (for anything, not just movies). Something to think about though.
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Certain Women
Shoutout @ctr123 on this one:
This is an anthology film structured in three stories: one starring Laura Dern (and Jared Harris), one starring Michelle Williams, and another starring Lily Gladstone and Kristen Stewart. All three seem to be in Montana, though that’s not made 100% clear in Williams’s case. Seems like Laura Dern is practicing law in Billings, Stewart is commuting from there to the town where Gladstone lives, Gladstone is off in a rural town minding a farm, and Williams ??? (they never show her at home). If you’re like me, you will be distraught that Jared Harris is speaking in an American accent that you would find in Montana, but rest assured that you’ll get over it.
The Williams story is pretty thin - I think I get all of the minor notes that were being played here, but she didn’t get a lot to do in this. The other two stories are quite a bit meatier, especially the Gladstone/Stewart story that goes third and largely caps off the movie. That one was quite affecting, and as you saw with Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon, she has to carry things with a minimal number of words and a maximum amount of internalized emotion in all that’s being left unspoken. She is SO impressive.
This is two Kelly Reichardt movies for me. First Cow was really strong, and this one (the earlier of the two in release date) was even better. Hope the Reichardt/Gladstone collaborations continue; Lily was in First Cow also, albeit in a much smaller part, but all the same that seems like enough to indicate that this is an actress/director pairing that might keep reoccurring.
4/5, strongly recommended. Will caution that a fair amount of it is on the slow and contemplative side, so do be in the right mood for it before firing it up. It’s available on a variety of channels you don’t have:
(But if nothing else you do have Pluto for an ad-supported option. And if you haven’t looked, it’s worth seeing if your library card connects up with Kanopy; that gets some good movies and you don’t have to deal with ads.)
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I generally can’t do that. Plus, as someone who knows how a lot of it works, I have a very hard time just turning off my ‘wtf was that?’ brain. I can’t just watch as an ordinary consumer anymore, so it makes a lot of movies and TV less enjoyable than it would be to someone who can turn that off. A movie or TV show has to click on a whole lot of cylinders to turn that off for me because I very quickly and easily lose my suspension of disbelief when stuff bothers me (visual, sound, mistakes, casting, acting, writing, etc.).
As a minor example, I saw Black Mass and Sicario on the same day in the movie theater. I remember after watching Black Mass thinking, ‘that was good. Whenever he was presented with a choice he made the right choice in that situation. It was a solid movie.’ Then we went and saw Sicario and I was like, ‘wow, Black Mass really was not good in comparison’. When your biggest praise of a movie is that the director made ‘right choices’, that doesn’t mean there couldn’t have been better or more engaging ways to get to those choices. Does that mean Black Mass was a bad movie? I doubt it, but it just showed what a different level of filmmaking Sicario was by Denis Villenueve. If I saw them weeks apart, I may not have given the two contrasting movies such a seared in memory, but that’s not what happened.
If you ever got to a point where you watched TV and movies in the same way I do, it would change a lot of your perspective about what you think really works and what doesn’t. You, LKJ, and ctr have a lot of that instinctually, but there are finer points to put on a lot of why some things you do and don’t think work do or don’t work that would open your eyes a bit more. It also might help you see when something you think works really doesn’t or when something does that you think doesn’t. That also might take away from the enjoyment of cinema going for you, so it might not ever be something worth exploring for you.
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I think this is band specific (and usually for movies director specific). An example of this was Shaymalan during the 2000s for sure. People want x band to sound like their debut album forever, or for a director to be as good as their last/best film.
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