Last movie you watched......

The Cloverfield Paradox. As a Neflix subscriber, saw that at the end of the SB so thought what the heck. Not bad for free. I barely remember the original Cloverfield but remember the Cloverfield Lane sequel as pretty good.

 

The acting was decent, it looked good and it kept me interested to see what would happen but, man, Paradox was a mess. It left nothing but questions, much of it made no sense whatsoever and it was pretty derivative of much better films.

It's obvious that it wasn't written or originally filmed as part of the Cloverfield franchise. Reshooting a couple of scenes to add the word Cloverfield and adding a couple CGI scenes did not effectively make it part of the series.

 

A little late to the party, but I watched "Get Out" tonight and they're going to be studying it in film, literary and social science classes for decades. What a great film.

A white person obviously can never fully understand the black experience, but you can really see how this story arose from the unease a black person might feel surrounded by mostly white people who don't have any shared experience with him.

The focus on eyes in the film really stood out to me, Daniel Kaluuya's in particular. He almost never looks at the other characters straight on. He's always looking at them with a bit of side eye, which conveyed so much about that unease.

Spoiler

Stephen Root's desire to see through Chris's eyes stuck with me because I felt like I was seeing this world through the eyes of Chris. The viewer was a passenger watching what was happening and powerless to change it, much like the other black characters who had undergone the procedure. As a white person, I think it gave me a unique perspective into this character that I haven't had watching other films.

The film really turns seemingly innocuous behaviors that many (most?) white people do in some way or another into something more sinister, and it reflects back to us how those behaviors can put a black person into an uneasy position. Hell, even Rose's defense of Chris to the police officer made him uncomfortable. She knew she could speak that way to the officer because she was white, but he was more interested in not getting shot than in fighting injustice.

It's not often a horror/thriller can be considered an "important" film, but I think this is one.

 

I look at the other nominated films and I'm sure they're all "good" - but they're the kind of movies you expect to be nominated, perhaps even were made TO be nominated. I mentioned it when I saw it, but casting Whitford, Keener and Williams (all with progressive "cred" in their acting choices if not their own politics) was genius.

 

Eyewitness - Early 80s, NY-set mystery with William Hurt and Sigorney Weaver. The thing that makes it great is the numerous character bits - Morgan Freeman, Steven Hill, Christopher Plummer, James Woods, Kenneth McMillian - characters who can tell you who they are with two pieces of dialogue.

 

Finally caught Sausage Party. I fully regret it. The writers were trying to be Seth MacFarlane, Trey Parker and Matt Stone in the unPC way they are with none of the nuance and restraint. If you took Bill Maher's approach to his religion documentary (which is to say going after people who pose no intellectual capacity to argue with Maher and declaring religion stupid because they couldn't hold a cogent argument) and animate it, you get this movie. It was garbage and obscene with no actual reason for it except to set up a really disturbing sex scene.

 

I almost think it was the result of a bet Rogan made during a "smoking session." (What is the dumbest movie you could get made) It could have been a clever riff on the spate of animated movies animating anything and everything, but even the animation wasn't very good.

 

Just recently saw "The Last Jedi." Hmm, I don't know, for me, it didn't live up to the hype.

 

I thought it was good, thought they would have laid more groundwork for the third film (which will be the last of this trilogy)There are what three characters that matter now, Kylo Ren, Finn and Rey? And Finn was barely in the second one. As great as it was to see the older characters get a fitting send-off it really hampered the development of those tasked with carrying the story forward.

 

Poe Daemeron probably belongs among the important remaining characters, too, though it may speak to a problem in the two movies so far in the trilogy that I can see why you left him out.

I'm also assuming Leia had a big part to play in Episode IX, but they have to change all that with Carrie Fisher's death.

 

Poe is a cool character, and we're seeing him get groomed to become a leader, but he really is far removed from the other characters. He's had like two 2-minute scenes with Finn and it seems like that's about his only interaction with them.