I liked this a fair amount when I saw it a few years ago also, but having watched the 1947 original now, the GDT remake suddenly feels like a pretty unimpressive project. To the best of my recollection, he didn’t innovate or meaningfully improve upon anything; he basically just put his own cinematography on something that had already been done really well.
It’s now going to occupy a similar space in my mind to 2024 Nosferatu, which also stared down a pristine predecessor and said, “Fuck it, I’m gonna do the exact same thing with 2020s visuals.”
I love this guys mind so much. Plemons is a genius and Stone only makes cinematic gold. If you like Lanthimos you will love this. I genuinely can’t tell if he hates humanity more than any living person, of if he loves it more.
With Eddington and One Battle the 70s era of the paranoid thriller is back, but bleaker.
A strong 3/5! I laughed a lot. Like holding my belly kind of laughs.
Some of the scenes felt like they were figuring them out on the day, but hey. You could do worse than the Mission Impossible strategy.
Should everyone see it in theaters? I don’t think there’s anything particularly cinematic about this. It’s okay to wait for streaming. But it is quite a lot of fun if you have 90 minutes to spare.
If you’ve seen Beau is Afraid, your reaction to this movie might strongly reflect your reaction to the first act of that one. It’s another anxiety-driven fever dream, this time with Rose Byrne crushing it in the lead role.
I won’t pretend to understand the true lived experience of motherhood except as an outside observer, but that’s what this movie is unpacking. There are stylistic things about this movie that often wouldn’t work for me: surrealist tendencies and the clear presence of an unreliable narrator are not things I’m usually in for. I thought they worked here.
In terms of intensity: it’s definitely present, though it was honestly a little bit less harrowing than what I went in expecting after hearing Mary Bronstein and Rose Byrne doing press for the movie. I see other reactions indicating that people found it harrowing AF though, so your mileage may vary. It’s definitely an example of feel-bad cinema, but with a solid artistic purpose. Anyway, it won’t be for everyone, but I thought it was good.
Byrne should 100% get a Best Actress nomination for this.
No no, of course I knew what you meant. Norm definitely wasn’t where I go to get my insight about movies.
If Tarantino had a non-annoying voice then he might be my #1 since he’s an outstanding movie nerd. As is, I abide his voice and personality because I value his thoughts enough, but it’d be tough to necessarily put him at the top.
A retelling of a Western as a PTSD fest. Everyone has it and everyone’s giving to to everyone else, by, well, killing each other.
A stacked cast, the story was interesting but I guess I feel as the history becomes more remote the psychological importance of hashing the era fades as well.
colin farrel is a degenerate gambler in macau and his game is bacarrat. and i’m like okay it’s probably the best pit game to play, you bet on banker and it’s 49.8% equity on a coin flip, it’s not poker but it beats blackjack or craps. but he’s not doing that he’s doing a kind of bacarrat i was not aware of where players get their cards and play against each other and the banker for winner take all. seems like a dumb game and reminded me of that 2+2 guy who was addicted to pai gow and would hang out at the las vegas airport to scam money off of people with fake stories about losing his wallet. that should have been the movie. this one was kind of annoying. colin farrel wears these leather gloves when he’s playing and he ruins every card he’s dealt by bending the fuck out of these cheap bicycle deck cards, i don’t even know why they’re dealing the cards face down the betting is over
This is a fair assessment of the movie. There was some loose improvisation occasionally but nothing like a normal Seth Rogen set. I definitely don’t think it’s a must see in theaters, but I think it is a must see. It’s one of the better assessments of class struggle I’ve seen on film (in some ways it’s really dark), and it doesn’t treat it the same way as something like Trading Places. I didn’t think Seth’s character quite got where he needed to be but it was close enough.
My favorite lines in the movie were:
Gabriel: Felipe, there’s something wrong with my check.
Felipe: What’s that?
Gabriel: There’s not enough money.
My biggest gripe with the movie was that the pacing was a little slow in the first act. It needed a bit more forward momentum early, but once it got going it was mostly fine in pace.
Fun piece of BTS info was that when Seth’s character passes out and Gabriel thinks he’s died and is doing a quasi CPR, in the B-roll, Aziz as director yells out, ‘Give him mouth to mouth!’ and Keanu says, ‘NO!’…lol
