Movies (and occasionally face slaps) (Part 2)

Makes me love the movie even more

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Follows a fishing boat captain who is approached by his ex-wife to murder her abusive new husband.

I saw this when it first came out and like most critics thought the twist was beyond awful. I remembered really liking the first half of the movie though. Terrific setup and good performances. This time the twist didnā€™t bother me nearly as much.

About to see long legs, pretty stoked

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Caught Longlegs this evening. Loved it. Great atmosphere, legit creepy.

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Same here. It wasnā€™t until I started reading up on and watching documentaries about Stanley Kubrick that I realized how great she was in The Shining. He was perhaps the most demanding director of his era, if not all time. Listen to any actor talk about having worked with him, and it comes up again and again. Matthew Modine discussed it at length.

The point being: virtually nothing you see in any of Kubrickā€™s films is there by accident. He micromanaged every aspect of his movies, so if Duvall was projecting ā€œdumb uneducated helpless broadā€ onscreen, itā€™s because Kubrick wanted it that way.

But I do still wonder how much of her character was Kubrick and how much came from Kingā€™s source material. I have never read the Shining book so i honestly donā€™t know. I did read Doctor Sleep, and she appears in that, but didnā€™t come across in the least as a dumb, helpless damsel. But in that book her character manifests itself through Dannyā€™s memories, many from childhood, so maybe he wasnā€™t a reliable narrator? And it is well-known that a lot of what we saw in the movie had nothing to do with Kingā€™s plot line (he famously hated the movie and disavowed it).

Wendy in the book was a hot blonde with a lot more agency. Just a totally different thing. Kubrick changed a ton in the movie. Book was a lot less supernatural as well; focused a lot more on cabin fever and alcoholism.

Pretty key difference in the ending as well: Dick Halloran comes back and plays the conquering hero to save Wendy and Danny, rather than Kubrickā€™s alternate take of him getting axed to death the second he arrives.

Kingā€™s hate for that movie is perfectly understandable to me even though I absolutely love the movie.

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Well duh derp, Iā€™ll be damned. This is why you donā€™t read books out of sequence lol.

This also explains why Dick shows up in Doctor Sleep well after the events of the movieā€¦I have been wondering how this dead guy managed to be a part of Dannyā€™s life (in very specific, plot-driving ways) post-Overlook. I mean, Danny sees dead people obviously, but that didnā€™t explain how Wendy was able to see and interact with Dick :sweat_smile:

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Speaking of Baldwin: it needs to be said that the otherwise perfect Baldwin monologue is hampered by the cringe-inducing ā€œbrass ballsā€ moment that Iā€™m sure a bunch of people think is so cool.

I mean, featuring it on the cover of the Blu-ray? Shoot me.
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I think his performance in that is one of two things in his career heā€™d like to do over (probably).

that whole monologue (and the character) were added for the movie, but that line in particular sounds like it was spliced in after the fact, thereā€™s a weird cut before and after that line. Itā€™s pretty subtle but if youā€™ve seen it 300 times it sticks out.

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You may well be right.

For anyone who hasnā€™t seen the movie, itā€™s basically the first proper scene of it (I think after Jack Lemmon makes a quick payphone call), so itā€™s not a spoiler to watch:

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Sometimes rewatching works. Sometimes it shows you the error of your ways and allows you to see the good in a movie you didnā€™t on a previous attempt.

And sometimes you rewatch Minority Report. Still a very underwhelming movie that people are very nice to. Within the Spielberg catalog: weaker than The Terminal. Weaker than War Horse. (Still better than Hook.)

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I think the biggest problem with this stage of Spielbergā€™s career is that he had no idea how to end a movie anymore, or he kept taking on movies with endings that didnā€™t know how to end. That was really Minority Reportā€™s problem in addition to being aggressively mediocre in a lot of other ways including forced product placement for whatever reason. Some of it was still good, though, but underwhelming is the best description of it.

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Love this guyā€™s videos.

That was the hottest mix of any movie I had anything to do with. I have no idea how it ever made it through QC. It was pinned like 90 percent of it and I still had to act like that was ok. And they delivered in the wrong frame rate and no one fixed it lol.

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Yes, being unable to simply end the movie was definitely one issue with it. No reason for that movie to be 2.5 hours long. I also just struggled from the beginning to really care about Tom Cruiseā€™s character, no matter how objectively sympathetic the characterā€™s back story was. Thereā€™s interesting stuff to mine from the movie, but overall it really does surprise me that itā€™s generally such a well-rated film.

I hadnā€™t necessarily chalked it up to being a product of that era of his career. He released Catch Me If You Can that same year, and although itā€™s been decades since Iā€™ve watched it, I remember that one being quite entertaining.

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I never saw Catch Me If You Can, despite doing an HBO First Look for it and having a poster on my wall in my house next to the poster for Black Mass (ha ha get it?). That seems like it had a more built in ending and maybe helped him through that part of his career.

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For anyone who hasnā€™t seen it, the whole movie is free on YouTube. Iā€™m gonna watch it again.

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