[Mezla PigDog]

Macros, on 13 July 2023 - 04:40 PM, said:

I hear Mezla running to the cinema?!

I watched the trailer with some interest the other day but there is nothing sexy about the character of Willy Wonka. I'll try my best if I see the movie but I'm worried this will kill off my inexplicable lust for Chalamet.

I watched The Woman King yesterday. It's bloody good. I love Viola Davis anyway but she takes it to a whole new level in this.

[Lady Bliss]

Can anyone explain to me the hype about the Barbie movie?

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Lady Bliss, on 15 July 2023 - 08:06 PM, said:

Can anyone explain to me the hype about the Barbie movie?

This one looks pretty interesting:




Barbenheimer

The other one... IDK.

[Mezla PigDog]

I don't think it's that hard to grasp. Take an iconic toy that the majority of girls in the white western world grew up with. Add in two megastar actors and a whole lot of marketing.

I want to see it because the marketing and the people involved have my curious enough and I had a lot of barbies as a kid. Same(ish) as I felt about the original Spielberg/Bay Tranformers movie and I had a lot less of those toys but I guess pre-movie excitement is more easy for boys toys due to then generally being more exciting.

I was at a Monster Jam monster truck show in a football stadium yesterday. Boys toys are definitely more exciting.

[QuickTidal]

Went to see MISSION IMPOSSIBLE DEAD RECKONING P1 on Saturday night, but had to bail 1hour in from dire stomach issues (we think something I ate as I'm fine now), but the hour I saw was great and my wife (who stayed for the whole thing, she calls the MI movies "her lord of the rings") loved it.

Got tickets to see OPPENHEIMER in IMAX on Friday aft. Excited to see a new Nolan flick in theatres!

[Slow Ben]

The wife has never seen a MI movie and I’ve only seen a few. But she loves fun action franchises so we’re going to start a watch this weekend, then hopefully catch DR still in theaters.

[QuickTidal]

Slow Ben, on 17 July 2023 - 05:27 PM, said:

The wife has never seen a MI movie and I’ve only seen a few. But she loves fun action franchises so we’re going to start a watch this weekend, then hopefully catch DR still in theaters.

We did this over the last few weeks too, and it was fun...especially seeing Kitrich again nearly 30 years later in this new one!

[QuickTidal]

polishgenius, on 31 July 2017 - 11:43 PM, said:

Dunkirk was really good, and the use of the score to build the tension was one of the best things about it.

So there.

The Zimmer/Nolan combo are one of the few setups currently in Hollywood willing to make a soundtrack that doesn't necessarily work so well as a standalone listen in the service of the film (Winding Refn is a fan of this principle too and has done good work with Cliff Martinez and Peter Peter in that regard). This film might be the culmination of their patnership in that particular playing field.


(one thing that still bugs me about Zimmer and scores is that he insists that he invented the Inception trailer bwhams even though he didn't.)

I'm here many years later to double stamp DUNKIRK.

It's funny, I steered clear of it because I didn't like INTERSTELLAR and some of the more lukewarm reviews after it came out, kept me bay...but sitting down to properly watch it I found it worked for me really well. I want to say that the lack of dialogue, music as tension, cross cutting between timelines really hammered home that he was trying to convey....if I had a comparison, in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN's opening the beach landing being chaotic and Spielberg wanting to show it from the angle of what the soldiers would have felt....that visceral tense thing...I think the entirety of DUNKIRK is that...a soldiers POV of an event that they all experienced from different angles....even Tom Hardy's pilot is seen as close ups of his face, and his targeting sight for most of the runtime to convey that. The music and cross cutting added to this, as did the clever swaps between IMAX shots and regular ones. I felt this culminated in not SEEING or HEARING Churchill's speech, but having one of the characters read it to another character on a train after they arrive home. That really solidified what we saw was a soldier's POV movie of the Dunkirk Evacuation.

It's not a war movie either. That's the thing that impressed me most. He didn't approach it as a war movie at all. It's occasionally shot like on, but it's not one.

Also, I'd watch Kenneth Brannagh saving England in pretty much anything.

[Tiste Simeon]

I watched DON'T WORRY DARLING and I loved it. I'm a big fan of Florence Pugh so I knew I was going to enjoy it too an extent anyway. It's nothing groundbreaking in many senses and the comparisons to the Stepford Wives is an apt one, but the tension and the setting and the use of music were all well fused together to create a thrilling story.

I'd like to see Chris Pine in more roles like this as he seemed to be having fun playing a more villain type role.

[QuickTidal]

OPPENHEIMER is a masterpiece. Possibly Nolan’s finest effort. Just…wow.

[Macros]

Watched Die Hart last night.
Short but a lot of fun

[worry]

Is that a height joke?

[Tsundoku]

Is it German?

[QuickTidal]

Diving into spoilers for full thoughts on OPPENHEIMER...

Spoiler

I know I said this was a masterpiece and it is, but you should not think it's an easy watch by any stretch.

This is the story of a man famous not for doing something good, but for doing something horrible...and like every other aspect of his life (being a noted womanizer and bigamist, but also diving headfirst into associating with movements that conflicted with the world around him amongst other things) I feel that Nolan does an admirable job of NOT glorifying him or painting him as some saintly scientist who helped the US "win" the war...there are times when I feel he gives Oppenheimer a BIT too much of a shine or "regret", but to his credit the entire back half of the film is cradled around the fact that Oppenheimer let the science and theory drive him without TRULY understanding what the outcome would be. He knew he was building a bomb, he didn't know he was building a bomb that would do what it did to the extent that it did. Nolan also leans right into the fact that Oppenheimer was not sorry he made the bomb possible, but rather that the goal in his head was to STOP an arms race by creating something so devastating that no "other" would ever want to combat it even with their own weapon as they would know it would mean mutual destruction...and I mean we KIND of got there with brinkmanship....but I think that Oppenheimer envisioned a world where no one even MADE more than one bomb, instead of our current reality of hundreds or thousands of devices that and infinitely stronger than the trinity test, or Fat Man and Little Boy.

The shaking of the background behind Oppenheimer during scenes where he's feeling...if not regret...then pause...over what they did...works for the most part...but I think the film ALMOST portrays this as his regret over the deaths he caused or helped cause...which I don't think Oppenheimer ever felt? Like from what I understand Oppenheimer himself was the one who in a meeting with Sec of War Stimson and Truman, when someone advised maybe a test NOT on a city would be enough to stop the Japanese...it was reportedly Oppenheimer himself who stated that no, a full test on a populated city was the ONLY way to get the point across. He intended this to be a last word on the use of these devices though, not a first...history begged to differ.

The 3 hours is used admirably split between the earlier Oppenheimer life, the Trinity Test/Los Alamos Lab times during the war, and the Cold War/removal of security clearance period...but it feels like the former and the latter are baked a LITTLE thinly as a result and I wish there had been more meat, especially to the latter Cold War portions...but that's as a history nerd and wanting the extraneous fallout explored....which I understand would not be present in a film about the man himself.

I WILL say this as a final word...this movie is an exquisite film and probably Nolan's best...but it's very dark, and not fun to watch, and hard to stomach...and as a person of Japanese heritage who's great-grandmother would have watched news of the events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in horror (or so I've been told) from Shanghai (where she lived at the time) as the village she was born and raised in was not far from the Nagasaki site...I can say that in the few days since seeing it I'm increasingly queasy about the content and I fully understand why this film was banned in Japan is has no release date in Japan. The trauma is simply too recent still. I didn't watch this as some glorification of the man, but a cautionary tale of someone so driven by wondering if they could, they didn't think about if they should. Oppenheimer was a villain, even though he didn't consider himself one. I also consider the man when juxtaposed against someone on the opposing side who was driven by his own science to bad ends, Jiro Horikoshi who invited the Japanese Zero, the aircraft that enabled the attack at Pearl Harbor and dropped the Americans into the war. Now, I fully understand that they are not the same thing....but the ostensible "enemy" at the time, The Empire of Japan, had its own driven scientist in Jiro, who once he understood what his invention was going to be used for by his countries military abhorred it and the war (which he called futile from the very beginning)...it's hard to see Oppenheimer as ANYTHING but a villain in all but name. In hindsight we all know that had Truman waited but three days after Hiroshima the Japanese would have surrounded when the Russians entered the war on the allied behalf...but he refused, and 85% of the people at Nagasaki were civilians bringing the death total for both to some 150,000 people. Jiro Horikoshi understood that his drive had wrought something terrible and regretted that it had been used for such things his entire life...I don't think Oppenheimer ever felt what he did was wrong, he just felt that the end result he vehemently assumed would come...was missed by humans being human.

Phenomenal film...but be wary it's not easy to stomach, and when/if it wins any awards, I hope focus is drawn not just to the devastation in Japan, but at home in New Mexico where the fallout has plagued whole communities for decades and decades.

Oh and the BARBIE stuff where people are like "I'll watch OPPENHEIMER and then BARBIE as a happier palate cleanser"? Yeah that's gross and you should feel ashamed. OPPENHEIMER is intended to sit with you, and haunt you...not to be washed away while you drench yourself in comedy a few hours later.

I think it's time to re-watch GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES frankly...

EDIT: I feel like this scene could have been added into the film to really hammer home things...but that's just me dreaming of a longer cut that fills out the edges.

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 24 July 2023 - 02:35 PM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Mezla PigDog, on 16 July 2023 - 06:10 AM, said:

I don't think it's that hard to grasp. Take an iconic toy that the majority of girls in the white western world grew up with. Add in two megastar actors and a whole lot of marketing.

I want to see it because the marketing and the people involved have my curious enough and I had a lot of barbies as a kid. Same(ish) as I felt about the original Spielberg/Bay Tranformers movie and I had a lot less of those toys but I guess pre-movie excitement is more easy for boys toys due to then generally being more exciting.

I was at a Monster Jam monster truck show in a football stadium yesterday. Boys toys are definitely more exciting.

And a writer-director who's a celebrated auteur... though most of the marketing may not have made much of that.

Quote

''Barbie' reportedly had a $150 million marketing budget — more than the movie's actual budget'

[...] rival studios estimated [...]

[...] ranged from a website allowing fans to make custom "Barbie" posters, to [...] teaming with Airbnb to create a life-size replica of Barbie's Malibu dreamhouse, and even collaborating with Burger King Brazil on a pink burger.

[...] brands jumped on the bandwagon to create their own pink items [...] "It stopped becoming a marketing campaign and took on the quality of a movement [to make as much shit pink as possible]."

'Barbie' Reportedly Had a $150 Million Marketing Budget (insider.com)

Also got some free marketing:

Quote

Ben Shapiro, 39, Films Himself Setting Fire to Barbie Dolls Because He Is Manly and MAD

[...] to prove how much he loathes “Barbie,” the right-wing troll pieced through his “pages and pages” of notes on the movie, which he apparently watched while dressed as Ken.

[...] wild 43-minute-long tirade [...] appeared to try and spark mass protests [...] whined [...] “one of the most woke movies I have ever seen.” [...] “angry feminist claptrap”

Ben Shapiro Roasted For ‘Pathetic’ 43-Minute-Long ‘Barbie’ Review (thedailybeast.com)

"I took 1 star reviews of #Barbie from furious men on letterboxd and put them on the posters because it makes the film seem ever cooler. https://t.co/V4YzmnB8bj" / Twitter


Which might partly explain:




... trending most relative to Oppenheimer in the reactionary South, especially Mississippi....

[worry]

Hotel Artemis -- a little late on this one, but it's on HBO so I finally watched it. It's got a great cast (& good stylized pulpy performances), some decent action, and a really fun premise and setting. I thought it was gonna be John Wick-lite but it's rather more Dredd-lite, with some cool near-future scifi trappings. There's a lot to root for (especially for an action-ish movie on the lower end of mid-budget). That said, the script is shallow, sloppy, and full of shortcuts. It CliffsNotes its own story and character-building in a way that is cornball and distracting. Kinda knocked it down a few notches for me, despite the good stuff.

[Tsundoku]

Looks like a good one with Sir Michael Caine and the late Glenda Jackson



... and for something completely different - here's a (reimagining?) of one of the most memorable stories (2 parter, no less!) of one of the best anime of my youth.
See how fast you can pick it. If you can do it in under 30 seconds, congratulations - you're old.

[Cause]

Is this a new hollywood trend? This year I have seen 3 movies that ended on 'to be continued'.

Into the spiderverse
Fast and Furious 10
MI: Dead reckoning part 1

Its really frustrating to see this medium which used to be one shot turn serial but my best guess would be that hollywood is trying tactics to ensure future revenue. Currently they only make pre-existing IP to ensure opening box office numbers are relaibly solid. This seems to be an evolution.

[Tsundoku]

Oooooookaaaaayyyyy ...

[Tiste Simeon]

Isle of Man legend that talking mongoose!