It’s completely self-aware, because there’s no way they’d get away with some of the humor they did if it wasn’t. Imagine the ‘blow off some steam’ line being a straight line. No way.
Re: The Wall
I did work for this movie and loved the ending of it. The end might have made the whole movie worth it, even though it’s being undersold for what it really is, a mostly 2-person movie with one person being solely through a radio communication. It has one piece of music in it for the end credits, and the lack of music contributes to the overall feel of the movie. The end credits music was a fitting song to the movie and would have worked as the end music of a Bourne movie, in my opinion. The song is an electronically produced heavy metal type song with a middle eastern feel.
Predator is also elite except that that it weirdly opens with an overly misogynistic and homophobic “joke” exchange that has aged terribly. If you start Predator at the moment Arnold steps off the helicopter it’s a perfect 80s action movie.
Set in the 1990s and 2000s, it follows a single mother who decides to kidnap her son out of the foster care system to raise him herself, as the two struggle with life in a constantly changing New York City.
Have not seen a movie this powerful since Moonlight. A perfect double feature.
It is also a low-key indictment of people like Rudy Giuliani, who were responsible for the laws and obstacles motivating this family’s decisions.
Includes many voiceover quotes from Guilani and his successors.
Leave the World Behind is the first fictional movie executive produced by Barack Obama and Michelle Obama through their Higher Ground Productions company.
If society actually did begin to completely break down, you probably would never know exactly how or why. You’d be aware that something was wrong, but the specifics would get cloudy once phones stopped working, the internet was severed, and media networks turned to dead air. Ominous late-night electronic shrieks from the sky; explosions in the distance; planes and boats plowing into the ground, and animals flocking in eerie patterns would only hint at the chaos. A whisper network of survivors might convey contradictory rumors, but how would you know if any of it was true? That’s the unsettling premise of Leave the World Behind, the new Netflix thriller that compounds its terror through uncertainty.
The film is directed by Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail, who adapted the screenplay from the 2020 novel by Rumaan Alam.Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke play a New York couple who happen to take their two children on a woodland getaway to Long Island just as things fall apart, while Mahershala Ali is the owner of the property they’ve rented, who shows up in the middle of the night to seek refuge in his own home with his daughter (Bodies Bodies Bodies actor Myha’la Herrold ). Can they survive together, or will they turn on one another as the situation gets desperate?
President Obama put Alam’s novel on his 2021 summer reading list, and would offer Esmail thoughts on the screenplay. The filmmaker essentially had access to one of the world’s most seasoned experts on managing a crisis. “In the original drafts of the script, I definitely pushed things a lot farther than they were in the film, and President Obama, having the experience he does have, was able to ground me a little bit on how things might unfold in reality,” Esmail says. “I am writing what I think is fiction, for the most part, I’m trying to keep it as true to life as possible, but I’m exaggerating and dramatizing. And to hear an ex-president say you’re off by a few details…I thought I was off by a lot! The fact that he said that scared the fuck out of me.”
The film also stars Kevin Bacon as “a construction worker, conspiracy theorist, and doomsday-prepper whom the families reach out to for help,” as well as 17-year-old Farrah Mackenzie, whose character “is obsessed with finding a way to stream the final episodes of the sitcom Friends.”
