robersora wrote:Another question, As I've seen it popping up again and again. Where is this weird guttural reflex and performative disavowal of relationships between teenagers and older men coming from? Like I get it, it's kind of weird, but the lengths Americans online go to show that they think this is wrong, is kind of strange.

That's a real 80's thing, it's also in Gremlins with Billy and Pete but in the novel of the film it's explained that Pete was looking up to Billy seeing him as a cool role model but Dante said in the commentary that this would not be acceptable today for any reason and was a thing of its time. How it got in to American beauty though I'll never know unless Spacey being the sleazy sexual predator he is made it so.

I blame all of that of the screenwriter, but I’ll also point out that Spacey’s character did the right thing in the end. I think both parties came out the other end of that headed in a more healthy direction.

I’ve more to say about age gap stuff in art in general, including in film, but I’d rather focus on that when I have more time.

Wolfwalkers is the best film of 2020. I'd love to say this is a debatable issue but I don't make the rules and simply can't say it is.
Science has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Wolfwalkers is indeed the Best Film released in 2020.

(Kidding aside, if you have an AppleTV+ account watch it and then watch it again and again!)

Wot? Such horrifying blasphemy I have never heard before! Wolfwalkers the best film of 2020? Do not, I plead you, dear people of EvaGeeks, listen to this man's ramblings! It is clear he has lost his mind and this "science" he espouses is nothing more than the scientific equivalent of snake oil! True, empirical, verifiable science has come upon the conclusion that it is instead Mank, the new masterwork given to us, the public, by the superb master of his craft, the one and only David Fincher, that is the best film of this year 2020! It is, ladies and gentlemen, indeed Mank, which is the best film of the year!

I hope you weren't offended, I just wanted to do something similarly joke-y. To be honest, I did like Wolfwalkers quite a lot and certainly more than I thought I would, based on my reception to Song of the Sea. But Mank is the film I loved the most this year. It was just so magnificent and near perfect with every shot for me. It's truly a beautiful work of cinema.

Zusuchan wrote:It is, ladies and gentlemen, indeed Mank, which is the best film of the year!

I just got back from checked in with the scientists and in a shocking revelation this is also a true statement!
While Wolfwalkers is the best film of 2020, it also seems possible that Mank can also be the best film of 2020!

Absolutely Fascinating!

My old heart has skipped a beat! To think that the world continues to provide fascination, even in this day and age! How wondrous, how wonderful!

Joking aside, what did you think of Mank?

I need to set aside some time to revisit it. From a technical and especially from an audio standpoint I loved the way it was done honoring and replicating cinema from the 1930s & 40s while not doing a direct imitation like The Artist. Though I think I went in expecting a very different film - I thought it was going to be Herman Mankiewicz vs. Orson Welles for Credit on the Citizen Kane screenplay: The Movie but it only got into that in the last 10 minutes and was really a film about the creation of Fake News, I think I mistakenly expected it to be The Social Network, my favorite Fincher movie, but about filmmaking credit and that's on me, not the movie - and was left a little underwhelmed on a first watch.

BUT, I also got the feeling that when I watch it again, now knowing what the film really is about, I'll go in with different eyes and might react to it very differently. And often some of my favorite movies have come from revisits when seeing a film with fresh eyes now understanding what the filmmaker was going for. So at the moment I was left a little underwhelmed but plan to revisit it over the holidays when I have the time to give it my undivided attention.

But whatever my final opinion ends up being I love that David Fincher is using that Netflix money to make a relatively expensive (budget was north of $40 million and below $60 million, those don't get made anymore) original story with no relation with a franchise movie shot in black & white that is 100% driven by dialogue and character. I want more of those to be made.

I wish I could have seen it in a theater but well, you know, pandemic.

I was put on steroids for a week. The doctor told me some of the side effects were insomnia. Well, I'm not one to let some good insomnia go to waste, so I finally sat down to watch Wim Wender's 5-hour sci-fi epic Until the End of the World.

I really don't have much to say about this movie other than I really, really liked it. I don't know how often I'll revisit it (that 5 hour run time is.... yikes!), but I really enjoyed watching the movie. It certainly was Wender's "baby," in that he just let this film sit in his head all day until it was perfect in his mind, and then made it. It's over-stuffed, meandering, has 3 different themes going at any given time, and is a bit aimless in its pacing, but I loved every minute of it. It's the kind of movie I wish my over-thought, under-edited movie projects actually looked like once I've gotten them written down on paper, instead of just getting overwhelmed and giving up on them entirely.

The location photography was amazing. The movie bounces from one country/continent to another rather frequently, so the viewer is never short of breathtaking landscapes to look at.

The weird part is that going into the plot of this film actually kinda bores me. It's about a woman who leaves her writer boyfriend to follow a mysterious man who's wanted by the authorities for corporate espionage. This mysterious fellow is wanted for stealing a device that helps blind people see recorded images. After the woman's boyfriend chases her all over the globe while she chases her mysterious crush all over the planet, they all catch up with each other in Australia just in time for the Indian Nuclear Satellite to crash nearby and wipe all of the digital technology that everyone was using to write books and track each other. This forces them to start anew while the mysterious man's dad, a scientist, uses the magnetic tapes generated by the blind visual recorder (that were apparently unaffected by the EMP effects of the blast) to help his blind wife to see using the super computer stored in a cave, also shielded from the EMP effects of the Nuclear blast. That whole paragraph is about 3.5 hours of runtime, and there's another 1.5 hours of movie after that. That sounds long and dull, but the atmosphere that's created by the cast and the scenery is genuinely a pleasure to sit through. I basically bought this during Barnes & Noble's 50% off Criterion sale simply because it starred Sam Neil in a Wim Wenders film, and I'm always down for Sam's charming smile and calmly rustic voice. Wim Wenders has a way of framing his movie around actors that tend to catch my eye. I don't necessarily watch any of his movies because I find his storytelling that compelling, but because he's gonna allow me to spend an expected period of time with actors I love involved in some weird idea that Wenders cooked up for an absurdly long time. As a result I'm mostly watching Wim Wenders films to see his cast build chemistry with each other exploring some idea that eventually becomes profound after about an hour and a half.

Anyway, yeah. Until the End of the World. Watch it if you haven't done that yet. But don't forget about the part where I watched this as a steroided insomniac wanting to calm his poor little nerves down in the middle of a global, deadly pandemic. It's not that I couldn't have watched a 5 hour film without those circumstances, but I certainly found those circumstances motivating.

Fantasy Island 2020

Just wanted to say I never watched the 70's version of this, so I'm coming at this blind in that I don't have the series context to compare.

So Wonder Woman 1984.....

what the fuck was that?

Is it really that bad? lol I've heard all sorts of things.
I thought the first one was...OK.

Gendo'sPapa wrote:So Wonder Woman 1984.....

what the fuck was that?

So all the bad reviews are on the money then? Just want to clarify so I don't waste money.

Didn’t go to theaters, and I don’t do streaming. I’ll RedBox the Blu-ray when it comes out, but I’ve heard quite a few things about that film as well.

kuribo-04 wrote:Is it really that bad? lol I've heard all sorts of things.
I thought the first one was...OK.

Wonder Woman 1984 is a terrible movie but it's actually kind've fascinating too. I thought the original Wonder Woman was pretty good & was one of the better recent superhero movies & because the film was such a huge smash success - it did over $400 million in the US which I think was the biggest domestic gross for a superhero leading their first film until Black Panther broke records the following year - and because of that director Patty Jenkins was trusted & given carte blanche to do whatever she wanted in the sequel.

And what she wanted to do in my opinion was bad.

Like I support the idea of letting filmmakers take full control of these silly superhero things & can get behind that. I much prefer that option to the mundanity (in my opinion of course) to the Marvel model but one of the few benefits of the Marvel Assembly Line is everything is so regimented, manufactured & quality controlled that while they never (again in my opinion) make a really great film they also never make a really terrible film. If you let the filmmakers be in charge you can sometimes get a The Dark Knight or a Spider-Man 2... you can also get this.




Regarding the spoiler things silvermoonlight asked:



The strangest & most uncomfortable thing in the movie is:



I'm not a big superhero movie fan, I like the ones I think are great and find the rest to be dull & uninterested, but I can appreciate that the genre just isn't for me and as a filmmaker I can see why & how these films work for the intended audience. What's astonishing about Wonder Woman 1984 is seeing a $180 million movie in this genre that you literally can't miss in - there's a like a playbook to make these movies at least mediocre success - fail so spectacularly for such blatantly obvious reasons.

If you got an HBO Max account you have until the end of January to watch it. But make a game out of it if you do.

Reading that was quite the rollercoaster... It almost makes me want to see it. Almost.

And yeah, you gotta wonder how a lot of that got past any sort of quality control and such. Especially the , holy cow.

Damn...just damn.

I watched the prequel to Train to Busan.

Seoul Station:

The animated prequel to Train To Busan that is a very well written thriller. You really get to like all the characters from the main character who is trying to move on from a life of prostitution, her boyfriend, the various police officers and homeless people whom you get to like or like to loathe over the course of the movie.

It's also a takedown and dark satire of Korean social castes and hierarchy. If the people in power in this movie had been a little kinder to the people they saw as beneath them. The Zombie apocalypse might not have happened at all. Multiple times in this story you see sick people begging for help and getting snubbed or chastised by various people with power over them. If any one of these people had chose to actually help the sick homeless guy at the start of the film, from the cops to the social workers, there wouldn't have been a zombie pandemic.

Spoiler for the ending. I mean it don't click the spoiler until you've seen it.

Watched Parasite. Wasn't sure what to expect but was pleasantly surprised but how much I enjoyed it.

Greta 2019

I'd say this is a more realist take on the stalker and murderer than most slasher.

child of Lilith wrote:Watched Parasite. Wasn't sure what to expect but was pleasantly surprised but how much I enjoyed it.

I'd say my expectation was too high as it being a multiple Oscar winning movie. It was good, not gonna lie. But wasn't as much as I thought it'd be.