Last movie you watched......

Saw Harriet. It was a cool story to tell just wish it was done better. There was some really annoying deus ex machina going on that took away from the over all story. I appreciated the woman who played Tubman. Just good not great.

 

Midsommar is pretty experiential - you either dig the filmmaking or you don't, and it has more power on a big screen. The set design, the costumes, the mood, the visuals - it's off the charts realized. Aster is a terrific director, and the movie will grow, with time, to be considered a great one.

The ending is true horror. That is, existential horror. The movie isn't about the cult. It's about Dani, and, to some degree, mental illness looking for a way to nest more deeply into a person, and blooming there with the help of whatever drugs the cult had and the kind of false positives the cult was giving off to satiate the May Queen. The last shot is that of a woman fully giving herself over. It's pretty unsettling. (And great.)

There are 2-3 images in the movie that can't be unseen. Human beings do some weird, rotten shit.

 

Opinion | Martin Scorsese: I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain.



In the past 20 years, as we all know, the movie business has changed on all fronts. But the most ominous change has happened stealthily and under cover of night: the gradual but steady elimination of risk. Many films today are perfect products manufactured for immediate consumption. Many of them are well made by teams of talented individuals. All the same, they lack something essential to cinema: the unifying vision of an individual artist. Because, of course, the individual artist is the riskiest factor of all.

 

See, now he just flushed his argument right down the toilet.

To argue that Ryan Coogler and Taika Waititi and Scott Derrickson didn't have individual vision in their movies is just asinine.

 

Martin Scorsese isn't wrong about Marvel movies – but neither is he quite right | Peter Bradshaw

 

So, a couple things.

*How do you not mention the driving economic force is the international box office? Marty's buddy George Lucas wrote awful scripts for the Star Wars prequels because, in part, they translated easier to foreign language. Marvel and DC movies can move overseas.

*Acknowledge that, yes, indeed, lots of "auteur" visions find their way to theaters and do well. Ari Aster? Auteur. Jordan Peele? Auteur. Damian Chazelle? Auteur. Alex Garland? Auteur. James Gray got to make The Lost City of Z and Ad Astra. The Favourite got made, and thank goodness it did. Spike Lee's movies get good distribution. PT Anderson, who I love, has nevertheless made two movies recently that were a...struggle...to find an audience. The last 30 minutes of The Master are winged, I'm pretty sure; they're whatever Anderson came up with. Darren Aronofsky's Mother! opened to 2,500 theaters! Love the movie...but that's not a wide open if there ever was one.

*We haven't lost the auteur stuff so much as we've lost: Courtroom/legal/Grisham thrillers, high-concept dreck like Sleeping with the Enemy and Jagged Edge, cop movies, and, to some degree, women dramas. Steel Magnolias, Terms of Endearment, How to Make An American Quilt, Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Hope Floats...there aren't as many of those. Instead of stories about real women, we have Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel and Jessica Jones and Jennifer Lawrence's Mystique. Is that an important part of American diversity? I guess. Sure. I'm not sure "girls have superheroes and action figures, too" is the key to our republic thriving deep into the 21st Century, but, I appreciate the importance of having someone with whom you can identify.

*We need more women directors who also get to tell stories outside superhero genres. Patty Jenkins got to make Wonder Woman. Neat. Monster is far better.

*I am worried about auteur theory creeping too far into superhero movies. Joker is an example. Todd Phillips can't make a straight-up movie about mental illness that people'd watch, so he borrows a DC villain to give us a deeply unpleasant - I'm talking "Precious" unpleasant, eye-rolling OK motherfucker, we get it unpleasant - picture about the human condition. There are so many wonderful, challenging, maddening movies about depression/addiction of men - Keane and Half Nelson were the first two that came to mind - that Joker cheapens a lot of it. Because parts of Joker are good. And they're designed to be ripoffs of two Scorsese movies. How did Scorsese not write about that?

*We can imbue superhero movies with more emotional profundity than they deserve, to the point where that becomes the goal and they officially become overwrought and kind of a bore. Black Panther inched right up to that line for me. The recent Avengers two-fer had a lot of unneeded freight, too. But...The Dark Knight was the best movie Christopher Nolan has made. His auteur stuff is certainly interesting; Inception is a movie about which I've thought a lot. But it isn't as good TDK.

*We're in a high-art era for horror. We're getting really good stuff along with the usual junk.

*We have too much Disney and Dreamworks animation. That's a big of a culprit as anything. And too many monster movies - the Godzillas, the dinosaur pictures, the fucking Terminator pictures, good God. That's all rooted in international distribution.

 

I doubt Scorsese has seen any of those movies. He certainly hasn't seen all of them.

 

I agree with you about the set design, visuals, mood, etc. Dani's acting was very good. The film intrigued me for the first hour. That turned into confusion and some mild disgust with some boredom sprinkled in.

I didn't find the last shot unsettling. My reaction was, "So what?" She had nobody left in her life and gave herself over to the cult. So what? Who cares? Nobody. It didn't feel like any of it mattered. It was about a confused, traumatized young woman who had no place left in the world and felt "held" by this group, so she gave herself over to them. But there were no stakes to it.

 

Echoes of Laurel Canyon is so much fun and gave me huge smiles; what a great reminder of great music.

 

I really liked The Irishman. The old fellas are all fantastic. A nice final hurrah, at least for them all being together. Especially liked Pacino as Hoffa. The aging technology is occasionally a bit distracting but overall wasn't anything that took me out of the movie. Was nice to see it in a theater but also looking forward to rewatching on Netflix.

 

I just can't bring myself to put in the time and money to see it in the theater when I'm going to be able to watch it for free so soon.

 

Terminator: Dark Fate. Pushed all the right buttons.