Under the Silver Lake. I’m not sure what I expected the director of It Follows to do next, but this wasn’t it. A sustainedly odd film, a loser has fun times with his neighbour, who disappears, so he looks into it. What follows is a surreal investigation into a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream of a plot, an original and cryptic exploration of a hidden-in-plain-sight underworld, visible only to those in the know, and absolutely befuddling to the investigator (and the audience). Watching Andrew Garfield beat the shit out of some unlikely targets is truly hilarious (starting with some children), and while the film has some fine moments of horror, it’s largely disorienting and puzzling, and wonderful with it, albeit so opaque it’s bound to frustrate. A real experience of a film, at times completely unmoored from reality, and sometimes entrenched in it.
Mega Time Squad. The bones of a good film, with plenty of good ideas and jokes, let down by a lack of energy, action, and urgency. The cinematography is painfully static, the film is stilted, and the performances are Not Great. A criminal idiot takes possession of a bracelet that allows him to travel back in time, and unusually for time travel films, allows him to pal around with past versions of himself. Mildly entertaining, with dialogue much better than the actors delivering it.
Lost me here.
Game ot Thrones…all 8 Seasons, rewatched 1-7 to have the best experience going into its final season.
Since it may be to spoilery to go into details and since I am forever in Team #TheBookIsAlwaysBetter™…I hope it ends differently there.
I liked the seasons 1-7 better the second time trough since the books weren’t fresh on my minds this time around.
Have no love for the conclusion of most main characters story arc’s and how they wrapped up the war of the 5 kings, but I give them a B- as a series as a whole and a C for the last season.
I’ll avoid the spoilers, too. I’m in the “too rushed” bandwagon. There were some epic moments in Season 8 and I don’t mind where most character arcs wrapped up, but so many of the conclusions felt completely unearned the way the season was paced. If the booms end the same but give the story time to develop, I’m fine with that.
Season 8 wasn’t the train wreck that some people want to claim, but the show certainly suffers for lack of development I’m the end.
Also avoiding spoilers here. I give the series an A on the whole, though I found the last two seasons to be lower than that grade. They changed the pacing a great deal in those last two seasons, and, as you wrote, there was serious lack of development–both in terms of characters and in terms of plot movement. Where the first six seasons were often dense with detail and carefully paced, the last two seasons rocketed around Westeros at a comparatively breakneck speed.
I didn’t take much issue with how most of the main characters’ arcs were wrapped up (aside from the feeling of suddenness about some of it), though I was sort of puzzled by a few choices related to which characters survived. I can’t say much without giving things away–I just felt like there were some characters we were led to have a very high level of investment in as viewers, and others that we were led to care about on a smaller scale. And by the end of the last episode, the mix of who survived and who didn’t was slightly odd to me. But that’s Game of Thrones, I suppose.
And I also think endings are very hard. And there are numerous franchises that I’ve loved that have completely botched their endings (Harry Potter and Battlestar Galactica spring to mind), so I’m prone to view the GoT ending in a kinder light.
In all, an amazing accomplishment over 8 seasons that I am very happy to have watched and will almost certainly go through again at some point.
Dear Lord yes. Galactica should have ended after they discovered Kobol. No amount of goodwill after the Miniseries and the first episode (33 Minutes) as well as a couple others with heavy battle sequences in them can save the series from the ANGST Pinata it has become…but surely the Toasters have a plan?..right? RIGHT???
It’s still not a film.
oops, my bad should have posted in the other thread. :-/
Just teasing squire, I don’t think it matters.
An Evening With Beverly Luff Linn. Perhaps it’s self-indulgent, perhaps it’s very funny, perhaps it’s both. An incredible cast, Matt Berry, Aubrey Plaza, Jermaine Clement, and Craig Robinson in a film that may be too quirky for its own good. I recommend it on the basis of it being a very human story told with a lot of humour and genuine feeling.
Toy Story 4. A competent film and an effortless addition to their ouvre. Simultaneously, it feels a little empty, and while it avoids some of the wrong notes 3 hit, the series needs to end here. While it may be impossible for Pixar to resist the Disney sequel imperative, the quality drop that will occur is inevitable.
+1 for the proper use of ouvre.
The Long Goodbye. Watching Elliott Gould shamble through this film is an unpleasant stroll; a man slightly out of his time and pushed from pillar to post by the forces he comes up against, from the police, to gangsters, to guard dogs, to drunks, and his own cat. This version of Philip Marlowe looks slightly soft against the hard edges of the world he’s in; oblivious to a suicide, wisecracks in police interrogation met with being called a fag, a standard apartment tossing and interrogation interrupted by the brutal glassing of a woman, and only seems to catch on to where and when he is at the very end. Leigh Brackett did sterling work on the script, and the cinematography is excellent, almost always in motion and imparting an appropriately unsteady feel to the proceedings.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. It’s rare to find a film that is as enthusiastic about its subject matter as it is competent. ITSV is a love letter to Spider-Man, and an update, and a self-referential cross-over, and all things to all men. The animation is beautiful, the soundtrack is bumpin’, and the whole film is deeply in love with being Spider-Man. The film has been absolutely Kondo’d and there’s nothing here that isn’t joyous. The best Spider-Man film.
Agreed 100%. Great movie, and for those of you with kids, great for the young ones as well.
So a friend recommended a film from 2014 to me as ‘amazing’. I tend to watch a lot of films, so I thought I must have seen it, but no, I hadn’t, except ten minutes in I realised I had, in fact, seen it, and not only that, I recommended it to the person who mentioned it to me. It’s taken him so long to get around to watching it, he forgot who told him to watch it. I have the worst fucking friends in the world. The film in question, The One I Love, is very good, and worth viewing. Just don’t take half a decade to act on someone suggesting something to you, yeah? Fucksake.
The Lion King
If you’ve noticed a pattern with my movie posts, they tend to be the Disney movies I’ve seen with my kids. But that doesn’t mean they are bad. The Lion King was nearly a shot-for-shot recreation of the original. The visuals were amazing. The songs were the same but I preferred the original artists. I thought it was a great family movie though probably too intense for really young kids.
Not to derail the topic but if that was a REAL rule I would have shot me in the head 25 years ago…with the tender age of 14 and a somewhat decent allowance the world of Manga (anime), Sci-Fi books and RPGs opened up to me…and let me meet my first, foremost and final enemy…Mount Backlog©!
My cousin’s husband recommended the Wild Cards books to me when I was 16 and I just read my first one two years ago when I was 33.
George R.R. Martin approves of you taking 17 years to finish one of his books.