Gave this another try. Maybe a little warmer on it than I was previously, but still didn’t do a whole lot for me.
New crew is really charming and well cast and the tocix fandom and legacy sequel commentary is a good angle, but man, does it just play by the numbers and does very little to differentiate itself from things it’s critiquing. Names drops Rian Johnson as the creative force of Stab 8 that seems to be the inciting…
Brud waited a whole year to cash out on the slap and all he ended up with was ten minutes of bits people have doing online since it happened.
I didn’t really get what drew Araonofsky to this material, but then two minutes into the film the camera enters a voyeristic mode as it peers upon a morbidly obese man (Charlie) masturbating to completion which triggers cardiac arrest, and then it all made sense. These types of punishing scenes that are there to be horrify it’s audience where the camera lears, the sound designs turns up to 11, and the manipulative score blares as Charlie binge eats, chokes on…
Man, this just nails every emotional, thematic, and character beat and has so many great moments scattered throughout. Coogler and company find away to walk a fine line of delving into a well worn franchise and finding threads to pull a story together that feels organic and a natural extension of what came before. All of the struggles with Adonis working out his relationship to his father’s legacy and how he can create his own are just done so well, from literally his fathers image being projected on him while he shadow boxes in the beginning of the film to the final frames.
Miracle film.
“Get me a plumber and a ballerina.”
Soderbergh returns to his male striper saga to give us Magic Mike à la An American in Paris. Plays out a lot like a fairy tale and has a couple showstopper dance numbers, with a final soaking wet, ballet strip show that works as it’s emotional crescendo, much like the closer of the aforementioned Minnelli masterwork. Seen a lot of people less than enthused about this one since it abdons the loose hangout…
Powerful stuff. From the setup it sounded like it could come off a bit stagy and stilted, but it’s quite the opposite due to Polley’s sharp script, some incredibly acting from the entire cast, and Montpellier‘a stellar cinematography. I think the heavy subject matter are handled really well and discussed in a naturalistic manner and the “men coming back” time clock adds a layer urgency to the discussions. I’ve also seen a lot of people critiquing the desaturated colors, but it works quite well to punctuate the bleak situation these women find themselves in.
The almost photo real animation is pretty impressive, but it an entirely soulless endeavor. This clocks in at 31 minutes longer than the 1994 classic, so I thought for sure it would change something’s up much like Favre’s other remake, but it’s verbatim the exact same film, with most lines cared over word for word and the composition of the images being almost exact, it just takes longer to do it when attempting “realism”.
Bleak stuff.
First theater trip for my boys! Cool experience to see them take it all in. Left and the youngest asked when we could come back and pointed to posters of upcoming things he wants to come back for.
Fun movie with some really great melding of different animation styles. Spiderverse has had a great impact on the studio animation landscape.
Finally caught up with this after a few failed attempts during its theatrical run and I was quite taken with it. Very much in the vein of big, broad, muscular historical epics that we’ve seen from people like Ridley Scott and Peter Weir that we get so few of these days. Really great direction from GPB and stellar costuming and art direction set the stage for the cast to excel. Davis owns as the bricked up hardened general, and Thuso…
Big fan of Östlund, but this feels like him on autopilot. Just kinda meanders and most of the humor falls pretty flat for me. Don’t mind big broad themes, as long as their wrapped in something engaging, but I could never get into this one.