I though this was very disturbing and strangely fascinating. The documentary does a good job explaining how intrusive and unsettling Cline's actions were. In particular, explaining the time span in which he would have had to produce and replace the sample with his own brought the criminal nature of his offense into a much greater focus.
I appreciate how the film made an effort to call out Cline's religious beliefs in an attempt to highlight his hypocrisy and seeming narcissism.…
Men builds off an unnerving psychological horror first act and turns into a relentless fever dream with some surface level commentary by the third act. But it might also be one of the most visually unique interpretations of the predatory power dynamics that exist between men and women and explores it with a self-confidence that defies the surface level subtext.
Men is better than Annihilation, on par with Devs, but no match for Ex Machina. It will surely be divisive but no matter the reaction, it's an intriguing entry in the growing pieces of art covering this corner of social commentary.
Podcast Review: https://obsessiveviewer.com/2022/05/21/ov369/
Pleasantville deserves more credit than it seems to get. On the surface, it's a charming and entertaining riff on how different 90s culture was to the Americana of the 50s presented in films and TV. But it's also a biting satire of that 50s Americana perception of the 50s and 60s.
As Pleasantville is exposed to the different and looser morals of the 90s, it isn't just pearl clutching at the thought of premarital sex and free-thinking/open-mindedness. It exposes the…
It isn't the end all, be all of rom-coms, not by a very long shot. To be perfectly honest, aside from Julia Roberts' fantastic performance, I don't find Pretty Woman terribly interesting. I think that stems from Richard Gere's performance, most of all.
It seems that Gere was going for a more classic Hollywood tone in his performance. The movie harkens back to the days of the endlessly charming businessmen characters played by the likes of Cary Grant and Jimmy…
It's not quite the MCU shattering multiverse journey that I expected it'd be and that's more than okay. Between this, Loki, and Spider-Man: No Way Home, it's good to see Marvel easing audiences into its multiverse storyline and not using it as an excuse to just pay fan service and fill each movie to the brim with easter eggs.
The movie does a great job of laying the multiverse out and creating a sense of actual history and stakes in each new alternate universe it traverses.
Above everything, however, it's an almost overwhelming treat to see Sam Raimi return to a big comic book blockbuster property.
The opening and closing scenes were okay. That's about all the good I can say about Memory. It isn't aggressively bad, it's just an exercise in very poor storytelling and bad editing. The plot is a bit bare bones. They try to treat the alzheimer's plot for Neeson's character respectfully by underplaying it. The consequence of this is that it becomes less of a focus on the story and more like a single piece of backstory for a flimsy, clichéd…
This was a really haphazard and sloppily edited thriller. The core concept of two teenagers planning what they think is a perfect murder only for a homicide detective with a mysterious past to work out what's happened is intriguing enough as a log line.
However, the movie doesn't do much with that concept. In fact, the film sets up the murder as somewhat of a "who done it" by not showing anything in the way of planning out the murder…
Really solid way to end the trilogy (MiB: International is...well, another thing entirely).
Introducing time travel into the mix could have been more hokey and more gimmicky but the movie managed to have a relatively fresh take on the concept in that it's in a universe filled with aliens.
The story between J and K resonates well and Michael Stuhlbarg's character gives the movie a bit of a wacky charm. The standout of the movie, however, is Josh Brolin's performance…
I was probably in high school the last time I watched Heat and I know I liked it. For teenage me, it had the appeal of having one of the biggest gun fights in any movie I'd seen and the fact that it was De Niro and Pacino together.
Now I'm much older and still appreciate those things about Heat. But I also find the duality between the two leads really interesting. Both are consumed by their careers/choices and can't…
It might sound insincere or overly saccharine to say that Language Lessons is a really sweet friendship movie, especially since it was a "quarantine movie" made during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But it doesn't present itself as a quarantine movie and, thankfully, doesn't have anything to do plot-wise with the pandemic. Instead, it's just hyper focused on the interactions of these two individuals and its executed with such an authenticity that its hard not to escape into this…
It's not as good as the first one, but that's a very high bar to clear. MiB 2 is a respectable enough sequel that takes a while to find its footing. Having Will Smith play the straight man of the duos he's in before Tommy Lee Jones' K returns is a bit of a drag. A lot of the charm and wit of the first movie was contingent on Smith's audience surrogate reactions to the silliness he was faced with.…
I don't think I realized this until this viewing but Men in Black, to me, is what Ghostbusters is to a lot of people. Nothing against Ghostbusters, I just connect with Men in Black a lot more and watched it at a much earlier age than Ghostbusters, so it has that nostalgia factor going for it.
Really, though, MiB's bread and butter is in the reality-adjacent way abnormal occurrences are explained as extraterrestrial and the way the MiB endlessly work…