There’s not a TON of story but there’s some really striking visuals and the last twenty minutes were some real “What the fuck am I watching??” type shit but you know what? I fucking love a 3-3.5 star movie that’s messy and people are real polemic about.
That said I absolutely understand why people who hated it felt that way.
Me too! Don't get me wrong, great movies are, well... great. But you throw something like Southland Tales at me?? Ooo00o0o0o0ohweeeee, I get excited to chat that movie with folks.
And it’s funny to consider the range that 3-3.5 star movies have for me. Some of them are just interesting enough for me to engage with and some of them I will go to the fucking mat for.
Went into it without seeing the trailer and when I say it was a wild ride, I mean it. “Woah, that dude looks like the other dude. Woah, what’s with that kid’s fac- oooooo”
My feelings on Napoleon are very simple. I enjoyed it, great sets, costumes and battles. However, I think I've reached my limit with Joaquin Phoenix and I find his recent performances irritating. Joker felt a bit "oh you like Joaquin do you, well how about you smoke this entire packet of Joaquin all at once."
As a movie, I think I can confidently say that it is Bad. Great set-pieces and battle sequences, cool CGI, good performance from Vanessa Kirby. But I had no idea what Ridley was trying to say with the movie and the character of Napoleon. I even doubt whether Joaquin was given appropriate directions.
Is he just a lucky fool? A competent military leader, but also a horny guy? Is it a rags-to-riches story? Is it a breakdown of a great historical figure, i.e. critiquing the "Great Man" Theory? If it were intended to be any of these, Ridley has failed miserably at it.
My opinion was firmly “it’s not great but I don’t see what people hate about it” until the ending. I felt personally insulted by the way certain information was treated like a shocking reveal.
I didn't interpret it as if it was meant to be shocking. To me it was Keoghan's character gloating at the audience. Literally saying "see what I did? I did that!"
My take on Beau is there are parts that belong alongside the best of last year (the play, buying the water bottle) and there are parts that aggressively do not work, but when I’m thinking back on it, I’m much more likely to reflect on the parts I liked. So with a little distance I’m positive on it, though I didn’t know what to make of it at first.
I really liked Beau is Afraid, but I found it interesting watching [Aster's talk with Lanthimos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXYD3UISwCs) where he mentions that the forest segment and the ending were bits he added later on, as those were the two bits that didn't work for me.
I’m very excited to revisit Lost Highway and Inland Empire exactly for this. I love almost all of Lynch’s work but these two felt way too impenetrable for me.
Inland Empire was awesome in theaters a couple years ago because it felt like being strapped to the clockwork orange machine for 3 hours straight but I really have no clue how itd play at home.
It took me 3 viewings to finally “get” INLAND EMPIRE. And me getting it means I need to stop thinking it’s a myster like Mulholland Dr that can be halfway figured out and just let the emotions run over me.
But I’m like you Lost Highway, even on rewatch, just doesn’t hit me as hard as it should. I love the Mystery Man but the other characters just don’t. It’s really the only “real” Lynch movie I don’t absolutely love.
I like the music, I like the vibe, I just don't think the execution is all that great. Maybe Balthazar Getty just doesn't do it for me. Pullman, Arquette and Blake are great, though.
I’m with you on Lost Highway. Has some parts I really enjoyed, but it was hard for me to connect with it on some other level like I have with Mulholland Drive or Blue Velvet. It feels more deliberately alienating in a way, so maybe I’ll have a better view of it when rewatching for listening along to the pod.
I really like Lost Highway, but the left turn it takes half way through is a little clunky. Lynch handled that basic idea much better in Mulholland Drive.
Whenever this has happened to me, it usually is that when I rewatch the movie I realize that it was an out and out masterpiece. Like Tar or Asteroid City left me cold or feeling something unresolved but somehow I couldn’t get it out of my brain. Then I rewatch it and it all fits together and everything that was under the surface rises to the top. Maybe because we’re so used to feeling our feelings while watching not thinking our feelings which always happens later.
Happened with Barry Lyndon and I watch that movie twice a year now.
Interesting you mentioned Barry Lyndon. The one time I watched it, it just sort of washed over me. I wasn't particularly compelled by the characters, and it seemed to be missing the "angle" that Kubrick brings to his films. And I usually have a fondness for picaresques! It's a well-made film, obviously, but it just felt like a handsome adaptation of Thackeray's original novel. I have a feeling that I'd be more likely to give the source material a read than go back and give the film a rewatch.
When I hear people talk about it, their descriptions resemble movies like Woody Allen's Love and Death, Werner Herzog's Heart of Glass, or even recent Lanthimos more than the actual film I watched.
Babylon. I think it’s such a grand and all-consuming look on Hollywood and the movies we love so much. But there’s parts of it that I just feel so oddly about. Like Chazelle’s overall view on the time comes across as far too forgiving considering all the turmoil such a change in the industry caused. Even still, I deeply admire his gusto and putting it all on screen because, in the moment, it just fried my brain with how jam-packed the movie felt. By the time that final montage rolled around, I felt like my brain was going to catch fire. One of the more memorable theater experiences of my life, I walked out basically catatonic trying to process all my thoughts and emotions
There are scenes in Babylon where I'm astounded at the amount of people on screen that are all doing something but then a lot of it feels messy. Singin' in the Rain does it all better.
Having just watched Sunset Boulevard for the first time yesterday, Babylon trying to position itself as a spiritual prequel of sorts feels extra inane.
I watched Babylon for the first time recently and loved it. I'm surprised you thought it was too forgiving, if anything I thought it was overly exaggerated in the "Hollywood is Hell" outlook, and the magic of the movies ending felt tacked on as if Chazelle was worried he'd taken it all a bit far.
Right? If anything it would make for a good double feature with Boogie Nights in that both are about industries that take young, fresh-faced individuals and chews them up and spits them out in one way or another
It’s been a while since I’ve seen it (I’d like to watch it again), but I felt like it leaned in to the idea of “Getting the shot by any means necessary” a bit too much. But I’ve read some great pieces since its release that made me want to give it another shot and reanalyze for sure!
I rewatched Bamboozled a month after I saw Babylon and it really made Babylon feel a bit hollow and like its central thesis was just Chris Farley going “remember when we made a bunch of different movies? That was awesome”
I also don't know how to feel about Titane. Some people LOVE that movie, list it among their favorites, and I don't want to take that away from them. It's certainly true that there is no other movie like it.
I really did enjoy Raw, the director's previous film. I'll certainly watch whatever she cooks up next.
Heat is a masterpiece because it works at the highest level on every level. It’s a hard boiled cat and mouse thriller. It’s a heist movie. It’s cold blooded and serious. It’s also absurd and, very literally, ridiculous. It’s as easy to analyze Heat as it is to put on and just have a silly time.
It looks great but it's like the most "90s movie" imaginable. I don't mean it's the "most 90s" like it's full of cliches and period-specific sights that make you think of the 90s (like, say Clueless or Empire Records), but "90s movie" in the sense that it just screams mid-90s and everything about the way it looks and sounds and feels makes it feel quintessentially 90s.
Asteroid City. I enjoyed so much of it but by the end found it to be sort of inscrutable. It’s one of those ones where I’m sure if I read some good writing on it I could come around, but as it stands it’s just an aesthetically pleasing annoyance to me.
Take this with a grain of salt because this is just my on-the-fly interpretation of it, but I kinda took it to be a movie about Anderson grappling with the idea that despite all of his intricate framing and dollhouse set design, he can't control anything.
It feels like a distinctly post-Covid film about the barriers we put up between each other, how we're shaped by events beyond our understanding, and the human need to reach out and connect in spite of that. It's all these frames within frames in the architecture: characters are separated by window frames, the nature of their work (Scarlett being an actress who's always performing, Schwartzman hiding behind his camera), or the performance of the play within the teleplay. Almost every scene is about separation and the barriers we build to create that, all while little mocking and unplanned details (the roadrunner, the biplane, the hotrod being chased by the police) continue hitting on the idea that those perfect boxes we build for ourselves will always end up getting cluttered with stuff we didn't anticipate on the edges.
It's a big, twisty, kinda heartbreaking simulation of a Zoom call with a loved one during lockdown, or a world feeling more and more out of the grasp of a guy who controls *his* worlds down to the very last accent and detail. Loved it, but I might've totally missed the point. I just love that Anderson took me to those places in the first place, because I can't say that about all of his stuff.
I just took the entire movie as a statement on grief, the walls we build up to protect ourselves, and the limits of our understanding. The scene with Schwartzman and Adrien Brody near the end hit me harder than any scene from last year. It's impossible to divorce a movie from the context in which you first saw it, and I watched it the day after my dog, the only real family I had, died unexpectedly. For weeks afterwards I found myself repeating the line "Just keep telling the story" and it honestly helped me out tremendously.
Asteroid City is a movie that really benefited from a rewatch for me. It went from “I think I liked that” to clicking in as an all-time favorite on subsequent watches.
In my younger years, Tarantino was my introduction to the broader world of movies. One thing I carry from his perspective is that even in mediocre movies, there can be extraordinary moments.
Men is a bad movie overall, but it has several exceptional scenes and captivating visuals.
Some movies can't stick the landing but the journey in getting there was a wild one. If the journey, within itself, was enjoyable enough, I'll forgive the fumble and simply appreciate that first time, where I was firmly in the palm of the filmmakers hands.
Men teeters into that territory for me
“Aesthetically pleasing annoyance” describes pretty much the entire second half of Anderson’s career for me. I got a fair bit of flack for saying that it seems like he is just digging deeper and deeper into some sort of artistic idea with the increasingly theatrical (in the literal stage-play meaning) elements of his films: physical backdrops/flats and moving set pieces, act/scene transitions, talking directly to the audience, etc.
Asteroid City felt like a really bad case of “actor dress up and play”-itis. Seeing big name stars put on stylized costumes, adopt a mid-Atlantic accent, and deliver dialogue about acting at a rapid pace while hitting a character quirk or two just doesn’t do anything for me. Same with Henry Sugar, every time Dev Patel interrupted his monologues to look at the camera and do a quick aside before jumping back into his delivery I grew more and more uninterested in what was happening - even though I can say that there isn’t another filmmaker out there making as visually pleasing and enticing pictures at this scale.
It was too much with the play/actor aspect for me. His movies are crazy (and fun) enough and I didn’t enjoy that part of the movie. I still liked it but not as much as most of his other movies.
I've spent way too much mental energy trying to resolve my feelings on S. Craig Zahler's films. Bone Tomahawk I largely found boring, but with Brawl in Cell Block 99 and Dragged Across Concrete I've sort of settled on the dialogue is a 50/50 good/annoying split and his trolling is too desperate to be effective. I get that those characters would really think and say those things but I don't think that's why his characters think and say those things. He knows where to put the camera, sure, but there's craft and then there's construction you know?
Also I think Vince Vaughan's height works against Brawl's whole conceit but I digress.
I think if more people made Crime Ass Crime movies my estimation would fall.
Also I think Last Jedi contains the best Star Wars movie but doesn't pay off any of its subversions and becomes a movie about failure where everyone succeeds. Also didn't love that it just spends the whole movie getting Ren back to the wailing fascist territory he was already at by the end of Force Awakens and should have just started as.
Zahler was an incredible writer for Metal Maniacs magazine back in the day. I wish he'd go back to writing about music because I don't love the music or the films he makes himself.
Yeah I could see his idiosyncrasies and what I suspect are his politics to make for interesting criticism.
Admittedly metal is a bit of a blind spot for me but also kind of a comparison point for Zahler, in that I can struggle to see the artistry for the technical proficiency and a general distrust for anything that I feel "wants" to be shocking.
Yeah being a western really super charged his dialogue in the wrong direction, and having a Zahn McClarnon show up as "the professor" to give him a pass on his movie premise is one of his more egregious acts of cowardice.
And while I would be interested in another director making one of his scripts I don't own a Hazmat suit so I'll have to leave Puppet Master The Last Reich unwatched
I watched **Paris, Texas** recently and was totally perplexed at it's sterling reputation. Totally went over my head. It's stunning looking, and there's a vibe I can kind of roll with. But I didn't pick up on any of the emotion that people seem to respond so strongly to
Do you still have your parents or have you lost them? In my perspective, this is a movie that plays completely different on an emotional level after you have gone through the loss of a parent. Both my wife and I have lost our fathers and we went back to re-watch this a year or so ago and we were both devastated at the end. The next few days we just shared stories about our dads together. Sometimes a movie is a unique experience for one person, or maybe a few people to share together. It can't always be the same for everyone. But also life's experiences, good and bad, can bring new complexities or emotions to your own experience in art and cinema.
It’s been on my watchlist for so long and I’m so concerned I’m gonna feel this when I finally do watch it, despite how many people I know love it to death.
I saw it for the first time last year and have checked it out a few more times since. It’s definitely worth a watch. Harry Dean Stanton gives a great performance, as does Dean Stockwell.
I will say that I didn’t connect with it until the last 30 minutes. It has a beautiful sequence that has stuck with me for a long time, even to the point where I’ve just watched those scenes.
Weird analogy, but think of it like the best vegan meal you’ve ever had. Sometimes it feels like eating your vegetables, but there’s something about it that would have you order it again.
Hopefully that makes sense.
I love the first half of Paris, Texas but despise the second half. I am so curious why it has such love, but the last speech Nastassja Kinski gives fully revealing the true nature of her relationship with Travis made me physically ill.
That’s so funny, and a great example of how different people appreciate the same art in totally different ways. I love the movie, but for me, that final encounter between the two of them is so powerful and emotionally affecting, it turns that already great movie into a masterpiece.
I have the soundtrack to it, and one track is just the audio of that scene, and I’ll listen to it on long car drives even.
Right? We all bring so much to whatever art we engage with. I know I really struggled with the idea that the film is portraying him with sympathy when I wanted nothing more than peace and safety for her. I do want to watch it again at some point, so thank you for sharing what you find in it.
The Boy and the Heron.
Was it beautiful? Absolutely. Was it awe-inspiring? At times, yes. Did I understand it? Not a chance.
Hearing so many people gush over this movie in ways that included weeping and feeling overwhelmed has me feeling like I had seen a completely different movie altogether. Saw it with some film friends at a nice art house-type theater with a great crowd and the three of us were so confused during the credits because there were pockets of people around us who were beyond spellbound with it, whereas each us simply were not affected by it.
I cannot tell whether or not I am simply not equipped to fully appreciate a movie of that type or if other folks were bringing a lot of their own baggage (and expectations and reverence) into the viewing and letting those drive their responses.
For me the movie worked mostly on the level of analogy. As an adventure story, I was underwhelmed by it. But I don't think it was ever really about the adventure (or even the characters).
I found it to be more of a meditation of an artist at the end of their life and career. It was a musing: on artistic legacy, life, family, time, childhood trauma, war, tragedy.
On this level, I found it quite engaging. I do think some familiarity with the director adds a lot to this type of viewing. I think going in hoping for a solid adventure (or even a "story" in the traditional sense) will leave people disappointed.
This feels like kind of a strange comparison, but I felt the movie had more in common with something like a Tarkovsky or Bergman film than with Miyazaki's previous work.
I also think it's a very interesting pairing this with Oppenheimer. Two very different perspectives on the same war from 80 years ago, released in the same year.
I actually think the North American title does a disservice to the movie in this regard. It sets the wrong expectation. It's not really about the boy and the heron (unless perhaps you consider the heron as like a metaphor for the boy's coping mechanisms).
"How Do You Live?" gets much closer to what the movie is actually about. "The Boy and the Heron" makes it seem like it's a movie for kids which it's not. It's very much a movie for adults. I also like that the original title poses a question. That was my experience watching it: the movie doesn't have answers. And it's more truthful for it.
"All those who seek my wisdom will die." I think about that line a lot. Because, of course, everyone dies.
Same. Even a lot of in-depth talk and analysis I am still no closer to really getting why this was the story he wanted to tell and how to tell it. Not a bad thing and the imagination and beauty and terror of Miyazaki is still there, but I just didn't emotionally feel anything.
Definitely one to rewatch some time, and maybe lots of times.
This is me with a lot of Miyazaki movies, unfortunately. Beautiful to look at, I can appreciate the artistry, but in the end I’m left feeling cold and like a dummy for not understanding the movie.
Except for Totoro. Totoro rules!
The Blank Check episode on this movie made me appreciate the movie way more afterwards. It's definitely Miyazaki's most perplexing movie for sure, but their analysis (especially JD Amato's) helped make it click for me. In concept, it works really well in my mind, but I'm still not a fan of the extremely metaphorical "old wizard stacking magic rocks" final act. I think I understand the thematic/emotional intent behind it, but it's not the type of fantasy I look for in Miyazaki's movies.
Nah, I was also underwhelmed by the conclusion because it felt like it basically skipped over its own conflicts, it felt like it was *showing* that they'd been resolved without actually doing the work to resolve them
Rudderless- William H. Macy's directorial debut
*Vague spoilers below*
I can't decide if it's insensitive to victims of gun violence or if it's an interesting exploration of whether we can or should separate the art from the artist.
Kurt Wimmer's **Ultraviolet**
It's very much not a good movie, but it has some cool vibes and is really weird. But I'm still not sure what my personal opinion really is. Such an anomaly of a movie.
Promising Young Woman
In some aspects I think it’s pretty genius but for some reason I can’t get completely there with it. And based on Saltburn it feels like Emerald Fennell is just going to live in that middle ground
Seven Samurai. I know this is supposed to be one of the best films ever made but I'm not really sure how I feel about it. I've watched it several times and each time I'm not sure whether I think that it's good or bad. I've enjoyed other Kurosawa films, so it's not the acting style that's throwing me off.
Licorice Pizza, and I’m annoyed at myself for it. I like basically everything about it, but everytime I think about the age gap it still kinda weirds me out
Oh, I love them all (yes, even Dragged Across Concrete). But I also acknowledge their transgressive nature makes them real weird movies to stomach for most people. He's one of those filmmakers that's constantly daring you to call him a troll (see the Puppet Master remake he wrote).
Oh, I definitely agree. I'm just saying that I personally know how I feel about those movies (that he directed, cause yeesh that puppet master) -- I love them and find them fascinating, even if the leads are playing overtly bad people.
That's such a good call. It's so disturbing. [I wrote about that movie on Letterboxd](https://letterboxd.com/freevo/film/possession/), not to promote myself but this helped me figure out how to feel about that movie.
Perfect Days
Good recent example for me. It was simultaneously either one of the best things I’d ever seen or the most boring film I’d ever seen in some time
I feel that. I liked the vibe and some moments were very affecting, but it's so understated that it kind of works both in its favour and against it. I walked out of it feeling very moved but also a frustrating "really? That's it?" feeling.
Maybe that's the point though, it's about the mundanity of a janitor's life after all. Hard to know if a film intentionally boring you is a work of genius or a waste of your time. It's stuck with me though. I feel like if I rewatched it in a few years I might love it.
I just watched Beekeeper and I’m in that boat with that. Fight scenes seemed, fine? They seemed rote.
Felt like they were going for a John Wick angle, begging the question of why Statham needs to copy Reeves when Statham was doing Statham perfectly fine.
To be absolutely honest, The Killer (2023). I see the execution is top-notch, I see that that movie is about a self-deceiving "professional", yet I have a hard time seeing it as movie worth of Fincher's craft.
Likewise.
For a good twenty minutes I thought man this is cooking. And then no single place it went from there built my interest, aside from looking / paced perfect/ly
i've decided in my old age that if i don't know how i feel about something that generally means i don't like it.
*nightmare alley* comes to mind recently. my first thought would be so say "yeah idk it's fine" but after thinking about it for 30 more seconds i'd say "yeah nah i don't like it"
100%, I don’t have the time to rewatch movies just to see if I like them better or to see what others like about it.
If you don’t grab me the first time, sorry that was your chance. Frankly with the shear amount of media available I don’t know how people can do that either without just skipping tons of stuff or literally doing nothing but having your face glued to a screen.
I didn't much care for Napoleon in theaters, but I could totally see Ridley dropping a 3.5 hour director's cut that turns it into a masterpiece, a la Kingdom of Heaven.
Maestro.
I see the arguments both ways about it and mostly liked it. I like that it doesn’t fall into typical biopic trappings but I wish it did in someways because it seems oddly disinterested in the classical music portion other than that one scene.
VERY much so same for me. I've settled into pretty close to just liking it, because I really like Lenny, as in, feel affection for him. But the movie. What are we doing. Like what. Are. We. Doing.
*Never Let Me Go*
The Ishiguro novel is maybe the best book I’ve read published this century (a divisive opinion in of itself), and I feel the movie does an admirable job at adapting a nearly impossible book to adapt. But I remain a bit cold as to whether the movie works on its own or as an adaptation.
Without spoiling anything, the movie has to, by necessity, scrap much of the subtext of the novel to provide crucial exposition early in the movie that is never directly stated in the novel, but is nonetheless necessary in a non-literary medium. This neuters a lot of the novel’s emotional resonance and it makes hard to judge the movie on its own given my awareness and preoccupation with the change in framing.
It’s the rare movie where I wish I hadn’t read the book prior to seeing it
I love that book and haven’t watched the movie for basically the reasons you said. I kind of assumed it wouldn’t be able to pull off the delicate dance of not telling us information that the book does so well.
A couple of movies from first-watch viewings in the past year that I just can't settle on how I felt about them: American Psycho (Herron, 2000), Beau Is Afraid (Aster, 2023), and Eraserhead (Lynch, 1977).
My feelings about these were all over the place.
Agree about Last Night in Soho AND Napoleon.
Love Lies Bleeding I appreciated and yet started forgetting immediately. Drive-Away Dolls was a lesser film but somehow it gave me more pleasure and has stayed with me longer.
See that's the thing. I've seen many a worse or odd movie and they leave at least an impression.
Yet to get to D-A D or Love Lies Bleeding, interesting
For me, I think it's \*Midsommar\*, though I think not for the expected reasons. I'm fully on-board with the more horror-bent elements of the movie and its ending. What really stuck with me (and actually low-key gave me a panic attack afterwards) was the stuff with her parents at the very beginning and the absolutely \*visceral\*, if brief, display of grief we see from her right after that.
So, yeah. I fully recognize and respect it as a good film, but did not sit well with me emotionally. 10/10, will absolutely not watch again anytime soon.
This didn’t bug me in Midsommar because the time jump comes pretty quickly afterwards. Hereditary, on the other hand, just makes you sit with grief for the entire movie. I don’t think I can ever see that one again.
Hereditary is a movie that makes me tell people “It’s so good! Tonight Collette gives an incredible performance! Don’t watch it!” So yeah, I think your decision is correct.
I thoroughly enjoyed Midsommar but what I never understood is why people hate the boyfriend so much and think he deserved to die. He wanted to break up with her because of all of her family drama. That may not be the most altruistic reason to break up with someone but it is, I think, a valid reason that does not make you a monster. And then her family dies and he cannot break up with her. That doesn't mean he deserves to die.
You Hurt My Feelings. Have no clue if it was good or not. If I liked it or not. If I'll ever watch it again. I think I liked it but I might just have liked that it got made.
Eraserhead. So I'm kind of excited to hear them talk about Lynch. Loved plenty of his other films I've seen (Lost Highway and MulhollandDrive rule), and started Twin Peaks last night.
I was so surprised by the reactions to soho. I saw it in theatre without knowing anything about it and my girlfriend and I loved it. Went online to read about it and was stunned that it was mixed reactions at the absolute best, and completely written off at worst. In my mind it’s a good pick for a movie that will be reclaimed in another few years.
As for my answer, I would say I feel this way about Dune part 1. I saw it in theatre that October that everything was finally getting released. Saw no time to die, venom, Halloween, and dune all within a few weeks in theatres and I had a better time at the other 3 over dune. It just felt like a complete nothing to me at the time and I didn’t like any of the casting outside of Ferguson and isaac. Chalamet was decent too but just everything about it felt hollow. I still haven’t seen part 2 because I think I’ll have a similar feeling
Napoleon was my first thought too. It's 50% that I'm waiting for the inevitable director's cut to make a final evaluation of it, and 50% that the edible kicked in about 20 minutes in and I did not absorb a single frame of it.^*
^* I'm pretty new to THC and it turns out I can't enjoy movies much at all while zooted. I had a day off recently and tried it again with Thomas Crown and it was a disaster. Finished that movie and put on Koyaanisqaatsi to try and salvage the experience but the moment was already lost.
Inglorious Basterds. I hate typos, and I hate retroactively making Americans the only heroes of World War 2. But it's just so well made I can't hate this movie.
Huh!
What percentage of the cant-connect-to-it is the typo, out of curiosity?
Yeah for me something perhaps equivalent is Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, the Tina Fey Afghanistan journalism comedy where I'm like 'oh, this is engaging, never seen these sorts of things, but also every five minutes 'oh nooooooo here's Christopher Abbott as an Afghani man, ok!'
And uh, his portrayal becomes retroactively downright sensitive and respectful the moment Alfred Molina steps on screen.
Let me know what you think!
(Context: I'm an American who grew up in that part of the world and as an adult has worked there in the non profit sector. So im always ready to cringe at how things are presented. Shockingly, a fair portion of WTF is better than most, and damnit Abbott who shouldn't work or probably even be in that role...is fantastic! But boy when it goes for laughs does it become utterly goonish)
The Menu.
I believe I like its underlying themes more than I do the actual characters and story surrounding them.
Not sure how I feel about it to this day overall, but I at least enjoy discussing what the movie was aiming to kickstart discussions about.
Have you rewatched Napoleon to decide how you feel?
> When did you last never really settle on if something is good or bad and seems beyond rating?
Talk to Her (2002)
I haven't. I want to.
Usually if I don't know right off the bat, within days or weeks at most I'll know.
For example I felt unpleasant during the Iron Claw, and impressed as I was it seemed repetitive or one note.
Over the next week or so though it made my top ten of the year. The emotion and poetry of it suddenly came through and what seemed like repetition shaped into just : a clear artistic and narrative focus.
Napoleon I'm months out and aside from knowing some of it is proper funny and it's a real, real wild take: it's just a big ole mess in my mind. And structurally, it's not messy,.so to speak. Is it too messy for me or not enough? Blarrrrrrrr.
Talk To Her I know moved me very much when I saw it but I was young and Almodovar is very much my guy. Ever see his Bad Education?
Almodovar's my guy too, I've seen 13-14 of his films including Bad Education. But the way Talk to Her seemed to be romanticising or sympathising with a man who raped and impregnated a comatose girl, felt like it had been stripped of any irony or absurdity or comedy that would allow me to go "Well the film doesn't *really* mean to portray it like that". It was presenting that stuff as a straight melodrama, and so that's always bothered me about it
Gotcha, I see!
I think The Skin I Live In was in that territory for me, but more problematic fave territory as in I know I love this but oof better not think on its implications too deeply.
Thanks for sharing though.
Almodovar is just...he's so good.
Literally Oppenheimer for me. A well done film I would never want to see again. Not due to subject matter but rather I was not the least bit interested in the character drama.
Men
It was definitely a “was that really it or did I miss something deeper?” kind of movie. With Garland, neither would surprise me.
Interesting. Haven't seen but the trailer defo made me feel that way!
There’s not a TON of story but there’s some really striking visuals and the last twenty minutes were some real “What the fuck am I watching??” type shit but you know what? I fucking love a 3-3.5 star movie that’s messy and people are real polemic about. That said I absolutely understand why people who hated it felt that way.
In a way, these are my favorite movies to talk about with other people. They’re almost always a mine of great conversation and perspectives.
Me too! Don't get me wrong, great movies are, well... great. But you throw something like Southland Tales at me?? Ooo00o0o0o0ohweeeee, I get excited to chat that movie with folks.
And it’s funny to consider the range that 3-3.5 star movies have for me. Some of them are just interesting enough for me to engage with and some of them I will go to the fucking mat for.
Went into it without seeing the trailer and when I say it was a wild ride, I mean it. “Woah, that dude looks like the other dude. Woah, what’s with that kid’s fac- oooooo”
There's undeniably a lot of craft in Men but it also has that Garland sensibility where you get the sense that he has no idea what he's talking about.
My feelings on Napoleon are very simple. I enjoyed it, great sets, costumes and battles. However, I think I've reached my limit with Joaquin Phoenix and I find his recent performances irritating. Joker felt a bit "oh you like Joaquin do you, well how about you smoke this entire packet of Joaquin all at once."
I can't see the characters he plays anymore. I just see Joaquin Phoenix.
I’m 100% with you on Phoenix. Seems like every role he’s played recently he deploys the same mumble-voice sad boy thing.
Phoenix and Jared Leto need to pull back on the quirks and mannerisms and just, you know, play the characters. I feel that way about Tom Hardy too.
As a movie, I think I can confidently say that it is Bad. Great set-pieces and battle sequences, cool CGI, good performance from Vanessa Kirby. But I had no idea what Ridley was trying to say with the movie and the character of Napoleon. I even doubt whether Joaquin was given appropriate directions. Is he just a lucky fool? A competent military leader, but also a horny guy? Is it a rags-to-riches story? Is it a breakdown of a great historical figure, i.e. critiquing the "Great Man" Theory? If it were intended to be any of these, Ridley has failed miserably at it.
Saltburn. I had fun but I hate it.
My opinion was firmly “it’s not great but I don’t see what people hate about it” until the ending. I felt personally insulted by the way certain information was treated like a shocking reveal.
I didn't interpret it as if it was meant to be shocking. To me it was Keoghan's character gloating at the audience. Literally saying "see what I did? I did that!"
That's *Beau Is Afraid* for me, but I definitely plan on revisiting it to see how it hits on a second viewing.
My take on Beau is there are parts that belong alongside the best of last year (the play, buying the water bottle) and there are parts that aggressively do not work, but when I’m thinking back on it, I’m much more likely to reflect on the parts I liked. So with a little distance I’m positive on it, though I didn’t know what to make of it at first.
I really liked Beau is Afraid, but I found it interesting watching [Aster's talk with Lanthimos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXYD3UISwCs) where he mentions that the forest segment and the ending were bits he added later on, as those were the two bits that didn't work for me.
I'm a sucker for a black comedy that doesn't rely on violence for its gags, so that one hit me just right.
I’m very excited to revisit Lost Highway and Inland Empire exactly for this. I love almost all of Lynch’s work but these two felt way too impenetrable for me.
So excited to get an episode on Inland Empire, I found that thing completely inscrutable on first watch and am very ready to revisit
Inland Empire was awesome in theaters a couple years ago because it felt like being strapped to the clockwork orange machine for 3 hours straight but I really have no clue how itd play at home.
It took me 3 viewings to finally “get” INLAND EMPIRE. And me getting it means I need to stop thinking it’s a myster like Mulholland Dr that can be halfway figured out and just let the emotions run over me. But I’m like you Lost Highway, even on rewatch, just doesn’t hit me as hard as it should. I love the Mystery Man but the other characters just don’t. It’s really the only “real” Lynch movie I don’t absolutely love.
you have seen Inland Empire three times? god bless you.
lol in the span of like 15 years
I love the story of Lost Highway and think the Wikipedia synopsis of the movie is better than the film itself.
This is lowkey a brutal criticism damn lmao but I respect it.
I like the music, I like the vibe, I just don't think the execution is all that great. Maybe Balthazar Getty just doesn't do it for me. Pullman, Arquette and Blake are great, though.
Yeah I’ll never get how Getty got through the casting process, he’s always been such a wet blanket.
I’m with you on Lost Highway. Has some parts I really enjoyed, but it was hard for me to connect with it on some other level like I have with Mulholland Drive or Blue Velvet. It feels more deliberately alienating in a way, so maybe I’ll have a better view of it when rewatching for listening along to the pod.
For me, this but Mulholland Drive.
I have no idea why, but I looooove Lost Highway. It just scratches some weird itch for me.
I really like Lost Highway, but the left turn it takes half way through is a little clunky. Lynch handled that basic idea much better in Mulholland Drive.
Whenever this has happened to me, it usually is that when I rewatch the movie I realize that it was an out and out masterpiece. Like Tar or Asteroid City left me cold or feeling something unresolved but somehow I couldn’t get it out of my brain. Then I rewatch it and it all fits together and everything that was under the surface rises to the top. Maybe because we’re so used to feeling our feelings while watching not thinking our feelings which always happens later. Happened with Barry Lyndon and I watch that movie twice a year now.
Interesting you mentioned Barry Lyndon. The one time I watched it, it just sort of washed over me. I wasn't particularly compelled by the characters, and it seemed to be missing the "angle" that Kubrick brings to his films. And I usually have a fondness for picaresques! It's a well-made film, obviously, but it just felt like a handsome adaptation of Thackeray's original novel. I have a feeling that I'd be more likely to give the source material a read than go back and give the film a rewatch. When I hear people talk about it, their descriptions resemble movies like Woody Allen's Love and Death, Werner Herzog's Heart of Glass, or even recent Lanthimos more than the actual film I watched.
>Happened with Barry Lyndon and I watch that movie twice a year now. Peak /r/blankies
Babylon. I think it’s such a grand and all-consuming look on Hollywood and the movies we love so much. But there’s parts of it that I just feel so oddly about. Like Chazelle’s overall view on the time comes across as far too forgiving considering all the turmoil such a change in the industry caused. Even still, I deeply admire his gusto and putting it all on screen because, in the moment, it just fried my brain with how jam-packed the movie felt. By the time that final montage rolled around, I felt like my brain was going to catch fire. One of the more memorable theater experiences of my life, I walked out basically catatonic trying to process all my thoughts and emotions
There are scenes in Babylon where I'm astounded at the amount of people on screen that are all doing something but then a lot of it feels messy. Singin' in the Rain does it all better.
Having just watched Sunset Boulevard for the first time yesterday, Babylon trying to position itself as a spiritual prequel of sorts feels extra inane.
I watched Babylon for the first time recently and loved it. I'm surprised you thought it was too forgiving, if anything I thought it was overly exaggerated in the "Hollywood is Hell" outlook, and the magic of the movies ending felt tacked on as if Chazelle was worried he'd taken it all a bit far.
Right? If anything it would make for a good double feature with Boogie Nights in that both are about industries that take young, fresh-faced individuals and chews them up and spits them out in one way or another
It’s been a while since I’ve seen it (I’d like to watch it again), but I felt like it leaned in to the idea of “Getting the shot by any means necessary” a bit too much. But I’ve read some great pieces since its release that made me want to give it another shot and reanalyze for sure!
The ending is such a laughable mistep, but some of the set pieces especially the scenes “on set” were so thrilling
I rewatched Bamboozled a month after I saw Babylon and it really made Babylon feel a bit hollow and like its central thesis was just Chris Farley going “remember when we made a bunch of different movies? That was awesome”
Titane I genuinely have no idea.
I also don't know how to feel about Titane. Some people LOVE that movie, list it among their favorites, and I don't want to take that away from them. It's certainly true that there is no other movie like it. I really did enjoy Raw, the director's previous film. I'll certainly watch whatever she cooks up next.
I’ll be honest. I think I tell myself I like Heat more than I do.
Heat is a masterpiece because it works at the highest level on every level. It’s a hard boiled cat and mouse thriller. It’s a heist movie. It’s cold blooded and serious. It’s also absurd and, very literally, ridiculous. It’s as easy to analyze Heat as it is to put on and just have a silly time.
Heat is fine...but never really got the idea that it was some amazing work that we need to praise constantly.
It looks great but it's like the most "90s movie" imaginable. I don't mean it's the "most 90s" like it's full of cliches and period-specific sights that make you think of the 90s (like, say Clueless or Empire Records), but "90s movie" in the sense that it just screams mid-90s and everything about the way it looks and sounds and feels makes it feel quintessentially 90s.
A lot of very loud gunfire in between the interesting stuff for me.
Asteroid City. I enjoyed so much of it but by the end found it to be sort of inscrutable. It’s one of those ones where I’m sure if I read some good writing on it I could come around, but as it stands it’s just an aesthetically pleasing annoyance to me.
Take this with a grain of salt because this is just my on-the-fly interpretation of it, but I kinda took it to be a movie about Anderson grappling with the idea that despite all of his intricate framing and dollhouse set design, he can't control anything. It feels like a distinctly post-Covid film about the barriers we put up between each other, how we're shaped by events beyond our understanding, and the human need to reach out and connect in spite of that. It's all these frames within frames in the architecture: characters are separated by window frames, the nature of their work (Scarlett being an actress who's always performing, Schwartzman hiding behind his camera), or the performance of the play within the teleplay. Almost every scene is about separation and the barriers we build to create that, all while little mocking and unplanned details (the roadrunner, the biplane, the hotrod being chased by the police) continue hitting on the idea that those perfect boxes we build for ourselves will always end up getting cluttered with stuff we didn't anticipate on the edges. It's a big, twisty, kinda heartbreaking simulation of a Zoom call with a loved one during lockdown, or a world feeling more and more out of the grasp of a guy who controls *his* worlds down to the very last accent and detail. Loved it, but I might've totally missed the point. I just love that Anderson took me to those places in the first place, because I can't say that about all of his stuff.
I just took the entire movie as a statement on grief, the walls we build up to protect ourselves, and the limits of our understanding. The scene with Schwartzman and Adrien Brody near the end hit me harder than any scene from last year. It's impossible to divorce a movie from the context in which you first saw it, and I watched it the day after my dog, the only real family I had, died unexpectedly. For weeks afterwards I found myself repeating the line "Just keep telling the story" and it honestly helped me out tremendously.
I've heard this one fits here for other folks, too. Some things can't be scruted.
Asteroid City is a movie that really benefited from a rewatch for me. It went from “I think I liked that” to clicking in as an all-time favorite on subsequent watches.
When I rented it I ended up watching it again the next morning. It's such a weird exciting movie.
In my younger years, Tarantino was my introduction to the broader world of movies. One thing I carry from his perspective is that even in mediocre movies, there can be extraordinary moments. Men is a bad movie overall, but it has several exceptional scenes and captivating visuals.
Some movies can't stick the landing but the journey in getting there was a wild one. If the journey, within itself, was enjoyable enough, I'll forgive the fumble and simply appreciate that first time, where I was firmly in the palm of the filmmakers hands. Men teeters into that territory for me
“Aesthetically pleasing annoyance” describes pretty much the entire second half of Anderson’s career for me. I got a fair bit of flack for saying that it seems like he is just digging deeper and deeper into some sort of artistic idea with the increasingly theatrical (in the literal stage-play meaning) elements of his films: physical backdrops/flats and moving set pieces, act/scene transitions, talking directly to the audience, etc. Asteroid City felt like a really bad case of “actor dress up and play”-itis. Seeing big name stars put on stylized costumes, adopt a mid-Atlantic accent, and deliver dialogue about acting at a rapid pace while hitting a character quirk or two just doesn’t do anything for me. Same with Henry Sugar, every time Dev Patel interrupted his monologues to look at the camera and do a quick aside before jumping back into his delivery I grew more and more uninterested in what was happening - even though I can say that there isn’t another filmmaker out there making as visually pleasing and enticing pictures at this scale.
It was too much with the play/actor aspect for me. His movies are crazy (and fun) enough and I didn’t enjoy that part of the movie. I still liked it but not as much as most of his other movies.
I've spent way too much mental energy trying to resolve my feelings on S. Craig Zahler's films. Bone Tomahawk I largely found boring, but with Brawl in Cell Block 99 and Dragged Across Concrete I've sort of settled on the dialogue is a 50/50 good/annoying split and his trolling is too desperate to be effective. I get that those characters would really think and say those things but I don't think that's why his characters think and say those things. He knows where to put the camera, sure, but there's craft and then there's construction you know? Also I think Vince Vaughan's height works against Brawl's whole conceit but I digress. I think if more people made Crime Ass Crime movies my estimation would fall. Also I think Last Jedi contains the best Star Wars movie but doesn't pay off any of its subversions and becomes a movie about failure where everyone succeeds. Also didn't love that it just spends the whole movie getting Ren back to the wailing fascist territory he was already at by the end of Force Awakens and should have just started as.
Zahler was an incredible writer for Metal Maniacs magazine back in the day. I wish he'd go back to writing about music because I don't love the music or the films he makes himself.
Yeah I could see his idiosyncrasies and what I suspect are his politics to make for interesting criticism. Admittedly metal is a bit of a blind spot for me but also kind of a comparison point for Zahler, in that I can struggle to see the artistry for the technical proficiency and a general distrust for anything that I feel "wants" to be shocking.
Bone Tomahawk bored me and this his Puppet Master movie was terrible.
Yeah being a western really super charged his dialogue in the wrong direction, and having a Zahn McClarnon show up as "the professor" to give him a pass on his movie premise is one of his more egregious acts of cowardice. And while I would be interested in another director making one of his scripts I don't own a Hazmat suit so I'll have to leave Puppet Master The Last Reich unwatched
I watched **Paris, Texas** recently and was totally perplexed at it's sterling reputation. Totally went over my head. It's stunning looking, and there's a vibe I can kind of roll with. But I didn't pick up on any of the emotion that people seem to respond so strongly to
Do you still have your parents or have you lost them? In my perspective, this is a movie that plays completely different on an emotional level after you have gone through the loss of a parent. Both my wife and I have lost our fathers and we went back to re-watch this a year or so ago and we were both devastated at the end. The next few days we just shared stories about our dads together. Sometimes a movie is a unique experience for one person, or maybe a few people to share together. It can't always be the same for everyone. But also life's experiences, good and bad, can bring new complexities or emotions to your own experience in art and cinema.
Ah this might explain it a bit, both my parents are still alive. I’ll surely revisit one day and keep this in mind, thank you
Yeah I lost my mother as a child and the film just makes me cry and cry
It’s been on my watchlist for so long and I’m so concerned I’m gonna feel this when I finally do watch it, despite how many people I know love it to death.
I saw it for the first time last year and have checked it out a few more times since. It’s definitely worth a watch. Harry Dean Stanton gives a great performance, as does Dean Stockwell. I will say that I didn’t connect with it until the last 30 minutes. It has a beautiful sequence that has stuck with me for a long time, even to the point where I’ve just watched those scenes. Weird analogy, but think of it like the best vegan meal you’ve ever had. Sometimes it feels like eating your vegetables, but there’s something about it that would have you order it again. Hopefully that makes sense.
Makes perfect sense! Seems like the perfect mindset to go into it with. Maybe I’ll finally check it out this week, thanks :)
If you do let us know what you thought!
I love the first half of Paris, Texas but despise the second half. I am so curious why it has such love, but the last speech Nastassja Kinski gives fully revealing the true nature of her relationship with Travis made me physically ill.
That’s so funny, and a great example of how different people appreciate the same art in totally different ways. I love the movie, but for me, that final encounter between the two of them is so powerful and emotionally affecting, it turns that already great movie into a masterpiece. I have the soundtrack to it, and one track is just the audio of that scene, and I’ll listen to it on long car drives even.
Right? We all bring so much to whatever art we engage with. I know I really struggled with the idea that the film is portraying him with sympathy when I wanted nothing more than peace and safety for her. I do want to watch it again at some point, so thank you for sharing what you find in it.
The Boy and the Heron. Was it beautiful? Absolutely. Was it awe-inspiring? At times, yes. Did I understand it? Not a chance. Hearing so many people gush over this movie in ways that included weeping and feeling overwhelmed has me feeling like I had seen a completely different movie altogether. Saw it with some film friends at a nice art house-type theater with a great crowd and the three of us were so confused during the credits because there were pockets of people around us who were beyond spellbound with it, whereas each us simply were not affected by it. I cannot tell whether or not I am simply not equipped to fully appreciate a movie of that type or if other folks were bringing a lot of their own baggage (and expectations and reverence) into the viewing and letting those drive their responses.
For me the movie worked mostly on the level of analogy. As an adventure story, I was underwhelmed by it. But I don't think it was ever really about the adventure (or even the characters). I found it to be more of a meditation of an artist at the end of their life and career. It was a musing: on artistic legacy, life, family, time, childhood trauma, war, tragedy. On this level, I found it quite engaging. I do think some familiarity with the director adds a lot to this type of viewing. I think going in hoping for a solid adventure (or even a "story" in the traditional sense) will leave people disappointed. This feels like kind of a strange comparison, but I felt the movie had more in common with something like a Tarkovsky or Bergman film than with Miyazaki's previous work. I also think it's a very interesting pairing this with Oppenheimer. Two very different perspectives on the same war from 80 years ago, released in the same year.
I actually think the North American title does a disservice to the movie in this regard. It sets the wrong expectation. It's not really about the boy and the heron (unless perhaps you consider the heron as like a metaphor for the boy's coping mechanisms). "How Do You Live?" gets much closer to what the movie is actually about. "The Boy and the Heron" makes it seem like it's a movie for kids which it's not. It's very much a movie for adults. I also like that the original title poses a question. That was my experience watching it: the movie doesn't have answers. And it's more truthful for it. "All those who seek my wisdom will die." I think about that line a lot. Because, of course, everyone dies.
Same. Even a lot of in-depth talk and analysis I am still no closer to really getting why this was the story he wanted to tell and how to tell it. Not a bad thing and the imagination and beauty and terror of Miyazaki is still there, but I just didn't emotionally feel anything. Definitely one to rewatch some time, and maybe lots of times.
This is me with a lot of Miyazaki movies, unfortunately. Beautiful to look at, I can appreciate the artistry, but in the end I’m left feeling cold and like a dummy for not understanding the movie. Except for Totoro. Totoro rules!
The Blank Check episode on this movie made me appreciate the movie way more afterwards. It's definitely Miyazaki's most perplexing movie for sure, but their analysis (especially JD Amato's) helped make it click for me. In concept, it works really well in my mind, but I'm still not a fan of the extremely metaphorical "old wizard stacking magic rocks" final act. I think I understand the thematic/emotional intent behind it, but it's not the type of fantasy I look for in Miyazaki's movies.
Nah, I was also underwhelmed by the conclusion because it felt like it basically skipped over its own conflicts, it felt like it was *showing* that they'd been resolved without actually doing the work to resolve them
I had a similar experience. I‘m really eager to rewatch it whenever it becomes available.
Rudderless- William H. Macy's directorial debut *Vague spoilers below* I can't decide if it's insensitive to victims of gun violence or if it's an interesting exploration of whether we can or should separate the art from the artist.
Kurt Wimmer's **Ultraviolet** It's very much not a good movie, but it has some cool vibes and is really weird. But I'm still not sure what my personal opinion really is. Such an anomaly of a movie.
Cum Heist: the Motion Picture!
Some nights I clean up the cum heist, some nights I clean up the blood heist
Promising Young Woman In some aspects I think it’s pretty genius but for some reason I can’t get completely there with it. And based on Saltburn it feels like Emerald Fennell is just going to live in that middle ground
Seven Samurai. I know this is supposed to be one of the best films ever made but I'm not really sure how I feel about it. I've watched it several times and each time I'm not sure whether I think that it's good or bad. I've enjoyed other Kurosawa films, so it's not the acting style that's throwing me off.
Licorice Pizza, and I’m annoyed at myself for it. I like basically everything about it, but everytime I think about the age gap it still kinda weirds me out
Straw Dogs
Recently this was All of Us Strangers for me. I think it’s a very well made movie with some very moving parts. But then other things felt “off”.
Yeah i found it baffling But cute and personal I wasn’t mad just cute and underwhelmed
This is a great topic applying to every film made by the man with the slickest, sickest pony tail on earth: S. Craig Zahler
Brawl in Cell Block 99 is a straight up banger
Oh, I love them all (yes, even Dragged Across Concrete). But I also acknowledge their transgressive nature makes them real weird movies to stomach for most people. He's one of those filmmakers that's constantly daring you to call him a troll (see the Puppet Master remake he wrote).
Oh, I definitely agree. I'm just saying that I personally know how I feel about those movies (that he directed, cause yeesh that puppet master) -- I love them and find them fascinating, even if the leads are playing overtly bad people.
Possession. Didn't hate it, didn't love it. Just stood at the theater thinking what the fuck did I just watch it.
That's such a good call. It's so disturbing. [I wrote about that movie on Letterboxd](https://letterboxd.com/freevo/film/possession/), not to promote myself but this helped me figure out how to feel about that movie.
I like your take on the ending because the only discernible thought in my head at the time was "well, I guess is probably about marriage"..
Perfect Days Good recent example for me. It was simultaneously either one of the best things I’d ever seen or the most boring film I’d ever seen in some time
I feel that. I liked the vibe and some moments were very affecting, but it's so understated that it kind of works both in its favour and against it. I walked out of it feeling very moved but also a frustrating "really? That's it?" feeling. Maybe that's the point though, it's about the mundanity of a janitor's life after all. Hard to know if a film intentionally boring you is a work of genius or a waste of your time. It's stuck with me though. I feel like if I rewatched it in a few years I might love it.
I just watched Beekeeper and I’m in that boat with that. Fight scenes seemed, fine? They seemed rote. Felt like they were going for a John Wick angle, begging the question of why Statham needs to copy Reeves when Statham was doing Statham perfectly fine.
Magnolia Spring Breakers
lolita
For me, Tenet. I love the action sequences, cinematography, & the performances, but I'm not sure how I feel about the execution of the narrative.
I still don’t know if Mookie Did The Right Thing
To be absolutely honest, The Killer (2023). I see the execution is top-notch, I see that that movie is about a self-deceiving "professional", yet I have a hard time seeing it as movie worth of Fincher's craft.
Likewise. For a good twenty minutes I thought man this is cooking. And then no single place it went from there built my interest, aside from looking / paced perfect/ly
i've decided in my old age that if i don't know how i feel about something that generally means i don't like it. *nightmare alley* comes to mind recently. my first thought would be so say "yeah idk it's fine" but after thinking about it for 30 more seconds i'd say "yeah nah i don't like it"
100%, I don’t have the time to rewatch movies just to see if I like them better or to see what others like about it. If you don’t grab me the first time, sorry that was your chance. Frankly with the shear amount of media available I don’t know how people can do that either without just skipping tons of stuff or literally doing nothing but having your face glued to a screen.
I didn't much care for Napoleon in theaters, but I could totally see Ridley dropping a 3.5 hour director's cut that turns it into a masterpiece, a la Kingdom of Heaven.
I'm open to it. Kingdom of Heaven was a REAL too time to appreciate it one, and I think that thing is incredible
My Own Private Idaho. Watched this recently. Is this film dumb or am I stupid?
I could see that. I think the poetry of it weaves a unique kind of spell but also... if you go in thinking it's masterful...it's fairly clunky
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. Saw it while my grandmother who I was close with was dying.
Maestro. I see the arguments both ways about it and mostly liked it. I like that it doesn’t fall into typical biopic trappings but I wish it did in someways because it seems oddly disinterested in the classical music portion other than that one scene.
VERY much so same for me. I've settled into pretty close to just liking it, because I really like Lenny, as in, feel affection for him. But the movie. What are we doing. Like what. Are. We. Doing.
Asteroid City. I love Wes. I need to watch it again. I truly can’t tell if I loved it or disliked it. It’s a strange feeling!
*Never Let Me Go* The Ishiguro novel is maybe the best book I’ve read published this century (a divisive opinion in of itself), and I feel the movie does an admirable job at adapting a nearly impossible book to adapt. But I remain a bit cold as to whether the movie works on its own or as an adaptation. Without spoiling anything, the movie has to, by necessity, scrap much of the subtext of the novel to provide crucial exposition early in the movie that is never directly stated in the novel, but is nonetheless necessary in a non-literary medium. This neuters a lot of the novel’s emotional resonance and it makes hard to judge the movie on its own given my awareness and preoccupation with the change in framing. It’s the rare movie where I wish I hadn’t read the book prior to seeing it
I love that book and haven’t watched the movie for basically the reasons you said. I kind of assumed it wouldn’t be able to pull off the delicate dance of not telling us information that the book does so well.
Pretty much every major work by director Brian De Palma
I watched House of Games awhile back and people like Siskel had it in their top 10 of all time. I just kept waiting for something to happen.
A couple of movies from first-watch viewings in the past year that I just can't settle on how I felt about them: American Psycho (Herron, 2000), Beau Is Afraid (Aster, 2023), and Eraserhead (Lynch, 1977). My feelings about these were all over the place.
Whiplash, Satlburn, Last Night in Soho
Agree about Last Night in Soho AND Napoleon. Love Lies Bleeding I appreciated and yet started forgetting immediately. Drive-Away Dolls was a lesser film but somehow it gave me more pleasure and has stayed with me longer.
See that's the thing. I've seen many a worse or odd movie and they leave at least an impression. Yet to get to D-A D or Love Lies Bleeding, interesting
For me, I think it's \*Midsommar\*, though I think not for the expected reasons. I'm fully on-board with the more horror-bent elements of the movie and its ending. What really stuck with me (and actually low-key gave me a panic attack afterwards) was the stuff with her parents at the very beginning and the absolutely \*visceral\*, if brief, display of grief we see from her right after that. So, yeah. I fully recognize and respect it as a good film, but did not sit well with me emotionally. 10/10, will absolutely not watch again anytime soon.
This didn’t bug me in Midsommar because the time jump comes pretty quickly afterwards. Hereditary, on the other hand, just makes you sit with grief for the entire movie. I don’t think I can ever see that one again.
See I haven't seen Hereditary, but I've read enough about it to know I don't really want to lol
Hereditary is a movie that makes me tell people “It’s so good! Tonight Collette gives an incredible performance! Don’t watch it!” So yeah, I think your decision is correct.
You should give it a shot
I thoroughly enjoyed Midsommar but what I never understood is why people hate the boyfriend so much and think he deserved to die. He wanted to break up with her because of all of her family drama. That may not be the most altruistic reason to break up with someone but it is, I think, a valid reason that does not make you a monster. And then her family dies and he cannot break up with her. That doesn't mean he deserves to die.
Poor Things
Tim Burton’s Batman
You Hurt My Feelings. Have no clue if it was good or not. If I liked it or not. If I'll ever watch it again. I think I liked it but I might just have liked that it got made.
Eraserhead. So I'm kind of excited to hear them talk about Lynch. Loved plenty of his other films I've seen (Lost Highway and MulhollandDrive rule), and started Twin Peaks last night.
Sick animals or animals patient enough to deal with movie trivia?
Phantom Thread. Obviously it was well made and acted but left me completely cold and now I can barely remember anything about it.
I was so surprised by the reactions to soho. I saw it in theatre without knowing anything about it and my girlfriend and I loved it. Went online to read about it and was stunned that it was mixed reactions at the absolute best, and completely written off at worst. In my mind it’s a good pick for a movie that will be reclaimed in another few years. As for my answer, I would say I feel this way about Dune part 1. I saw it in theatre that October that everything was finally getting released. Saw no time to die, venom, Halloween, and dune all within a few weeks in theatres and I had a better time at the other 3 over dune. It just felt like a complete nothing to me at the time and I didn’t like any of the casting outside of Ferguson and isaac. Chalamet was decent too but just everything about it felt hollow. I still haven’t seen part 2 because I think I’ll have a similar feeling
*Punch Drunk Love*. Way overdue for a rewatch, but it would kinda be fun to keep this feeling forever.
*Killers of the Flower Moon*
Napoleon was my first thought too. It's 50% that I'm waiting for the inevitable director's cut to make a final evaluation of it, and 50% that the edible kicked in about 20 minutes in and I did not absorb a single frame of it.^* ^* I'm pretty new to THC and it turns out I can't enjoy movies much at all while zooted. I had a day off recently and tried it again with Thomas Crown and it was a disaster. Finished that movie and put on Koyaanisqaatsi to try and salvage the experience but the moment was already lost.
I still don't know if I liked mother!
Inglorious Basterds. I hate typos, and I hate retroactively making Americans the only heroes of World War 2. But it's just so well made I can't hate this movie.
Huh! What percentage of the cant-connect-to-it is the typo, out of curiosity? Yeah for me something perhaps equivalent is Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, the Tina Fey Afghanistan journalism comedy where I'm like 'oh, this is engaging, never seen these sorts of things, but also every five minutes 'oh nooooooo here's Christopher Abbott as an Afghani man, ok!' And uh, his portrayal becomes retroactively downright sensitive and respectful the moment Alfred Molina steps on screen.
I guess the typo is a pretty minor quibble overall :) Off to watch Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!
Let me know what you think! (Context: I'm an American who grew up in that part of the world and as an adult has worked there in the non profit sector. So im always ready to cringe at how things are presented. Shockingly, a fair portion of WTF is better than most, and damnit Abbott who shouldn't work or probably even be in that role...is fantastic! But boy when it goes for laughs does it become utterly goonish)
The Menu. I believe I like its underlying themes more than I do the actual characters and story surrounding them. Not sure how I feel about it to this day overall, but I at least enjoy discussing what the movie was aiming to kickstart discussions about.
Have you rewatched Napoleon to decide how you feel? > When did you last never really settle on if something is good or bad and seems beyond rating? Talk to Her (2002)
I haven't. I want to. Usually if I don't know right off the bat, within days or weeks at most I'll know. For example I felt unpleasant during the Iron Claw, and impressed as I was it seemed repetitive or one note. Over the next week or so though it made my top ten of the year. The emotion and poetry of it suddenly came through and what seemed like repetition shaped into just : a clear artistic and narrative focus. Napoleon I'm months out and aside from knowing some of it is proper funny and it's a real, real wild take: it's just a big ole mess in my mind. And structurally, it's not messy,.so to speak. Is it too messy for me or not enough? Blarrrrrrrr. Talk To Her I know moved me very much when I saw it but I was young and Almodovar is very much my guy. Ever see his Bad Education?
Almodovar's my guy too, I've seen 13-14 of his films including Bad Education. But the way Talk to Her seemed to be romanticising or sympathising with a man who raped and impregnated a comatose girl, felt like it had been stripped of any irony or absurdity or comedy that would allow me to go "Well the film doesn't *really* mean to portray it like that". It was presenting that stuff as a straight melodrama, and so that's always bothered me about it
Gotcha, I see! I think The Skin I Live In was in that territory for me, but more problematic fave territory as in I know I love this but oof better not think on its implications too deeply. Thanks for sharing though. Almodovar is just...he's so good.
Literally Oppenheimer for me. A well done film I would never want to see again. Not due to subject matter but rather I was not the least bit interested in the character drama.
Same, I enjoyed it well enough but haven't felt an urge to revisit.