But then, why not? If “low caste people” wouldn’t have caused you to question why they were the community that saved the hero, I’m not sure why hijra have to justify their existence in a movie. It is, in fact, good to have trans and other characters from marginalized groups that just exist in movies without having to explain or justify their presence there despite their membership in such a group.
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Watched two comedy specials.
Ali Wong: Single Lady is a lot raunchier than for my tastes but was very funny otherwise.
Dave Chappelle: The Dreamer was a mistake for me to watch. It wasn’t just offensive for trans (and handicap) people, it wasn’t funny, which is offensive to comedians. I just assumed from his other specials that aside from the trans jokes, it would be good. Boy was I wrong.
That’s fine. It just seems to me that the writer was going for more than that. I want to know if that is the case or not.
Also the caste system in India has been well publicized and critiqued, so doing that would seem more conventional and less surprising. That one is almost a trope at this point, so it shouldn’t be surprising at all.
Conclave (2024)
Loved this till the end which is kinda silly. Some really great acting, set design and cinematography. The end is a West Wing liberal fantasy and the twist is kinda silly. Otherwise, it has some great dialogue and intrigue. Whole thing is a thinly veiled allegory for current US politics.
Grade: B+
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Watching Trap
It is a fantastic premise…but oof
Yep M Night spends more time trying to build his daughters music career than building a reasonable plot. A basic rule of script writing, you don’t introduce a key plot device the minute you are about to activate it.
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Intrusion
Starring Freida Pinto and the guy from Upgrade.
After a generic but strong home invasion start, this turned into a laughably bad thriller. The main character is too stupid to live. There are plot holes big enough to house every planet in our galaxy. The ending is ridiculous. The one thematic point of the story is used like a sledgehammer.
Don’t @ me for finishing this. I watched it on the bus.
It’s on Netflix.
1/5
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Oh my, Trap is quite bad. A 30 minute concert movie for Night’s daugjter wrapped around the worst dialogue of the year. Absolutely obnoxious but at least fun to make fun of, unlike Woman of the Hour which was painful to sit through and felt just gross and icky knowing it was made about an actual monster who killed actual living people. I dont know why but semi-fictionalizing it makes it just feel exploitative and gross.
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Welp. Granted that it didn’t actually look likely to be good. But when it first dropped a trailer it got mocked really hard, and I wanted those people to be wrong.
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The constraint is pretty cool. A million years at one location with the camera fixed the entire time. Sounds like it could really work but didn’t here.
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Don’t Move
An excellent thriller about a woman kidnapped in the woods and given a paralytic agent that slowly makes it impossible for her to move. Great pacing, good thrills, characters make smart decisions. The ending was a little soft but did what it needed to do.
replaying My Dinner With Andre as i fall asleep and it becomes the best podcast i’ve ever heard
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The Gunfighter (1950)
Enjoyable western led by a different sort of character than I’ve seen Gregory Peck play before. Honestly, I struggled with whether Peck was the right guy for this part. He’s an inherently enjoyable performer to spend time watching, but his character was clearly supposed to be a morally complicated one, and I sort of had a reaction that he was so likable that it made only the redeeming aspects of the character all that believable. Still, he certainly wasn’t bad.
Beyond that, from a theme standpoint, I liked this as a meditation on loneliness from a somewhat different angle than I believe I’ve seen it approached from. The messaging is relatively subtle for a lot of the run time, but it’s certainly there. Anyway, good movie. Available on Peacock and Tubi.
3.5/5
The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
So…they put Marilyn Monroe alone on the poster to advertise this movie, and she’s barely in it. Dirty pool. Thankfully, the movie is a blast anyway. Really fun to watch a varied group of characters with differing agendas get woven together so seamlessly in this heist movie.
While I owe Sterling Hayden no apologies for my relentless slagging of his performance in The Godfather, he was…somehow actually good in this. (I started to go with non-terrible, and realized that to be fully honest I owed him a full-on “good.”) Hayden’s character ends up being the most compelling one to me, and it wasn’t just the material carrying him. He legitimately does his part to make this thing sing.
Very much recommended. Available on Hoopla and Tubi.
4/5
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I was waiting for you to see this so your opinion on Hayden would change.
Yeah, I remembered you telling me to watch it. Good recommendation. I’ve previously seen The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Maltese Falcon (albeit both were a decent while ago), but I can see I need to delve even further into the John Huston catalog.
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La Chinoise (1968)
What if wes anderson directed a what-we-do-in-the-shadows type mockumentary of a tiny group of college-aged french maoists who form a revolutionary group, and they’re battling against their rivals, a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary group, as well as agitating for full on communist revolution in france. Only problem is there’s only like 5 of them.
None of them have jobs, but they live in a beautiful parisian apartment because their parents are all wealthy. They spend all day discussing and debating the superiority of maoist philosophy. Some really wonderful dualities in this one, like they’re right and they’re wrong, they’re really smart and really dumb. And at the same time the framing of the story changes between a film, a propaganda film the characters are making, a documentary, a documentary the characters are making. i had a lot of fun. 5 bags of popcorn
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Saw a TV for Gladiator. Decent commercial at least. Denzel and Pedro…
Let’s Start a Cult
4/10
I like Stavos as a podcaster and comedian, but movies have their own rhythm and timing and Stavos doesn’t have it… yet. He needs an acting class and the script could have used someone who knew how to write a movie for a comedian.
It wasn’t terrible but a lot of the movie is a lot of a person talks, Stavos quips, another person talks, cut back to Stavos for a quip, another person talks, cut to Stavos for a quip. It got repetitive.
Ironically the other actors were good, I thought.
I ended up falling asleep in act 2 and woke up for the last 10 minutes.
Hijack 93 is a somewhat true story about four men who hijacked a Nigerian Airways flight in 1993. Reviews were not kind to this, but I thought it was a solid 3/5, as evidenced by it being in the top 10 Netflix movies this week.
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Thinking of Halloween III and Cronenberg’s Rabid for a Halloween movie marathon. Might watch Frankenstein tomorrow bc I always like to revisit the classic Universal monsterverse.
Sterling Hayden is one of my go-to problematic favorites. Can’t cancel him because he’s in too many great movies.
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