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Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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britishbornandbread posted:

Just watched Everything Everywhere All At Once. My wife and I absolutely loved it. Fantastic acting, effects, even costumes. I look forward to watching it again.

I tried showing it to my roommate and he made it about halfway (to the reveal of the everything bagel) and started fidgeting and paused it and was like "WHAT THE gently caress THIS IS LIKE THREE HOURS LONG" and stomped off.

Last time I try showing him anything, he didn't even get to raccacoonie

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Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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Badlands — man that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gassenhauer theme sure gets around a lot. I was like "whoa it's the True Romance theme" and my roommate was like "hey are you watching Finding Forrester?"

I can see why it's worth knowing this one though; the languid and laconic acting that makes you think both stars are either developmentally disabled or on drugs the whole time feels like the kind of choice I remember encountering in short stories from 90s anthologies where characters react to murder or death with mild disinterest at best, sun beating on them through a broken window while they live in an abandoned house with a dead body slowly rotting next to them. You wonder how people this passive, and yet with such a rock-in-a-pond effect on the world they sleepwalk through, can coexist in the same world where people shriek and shout and kung-fu-fight their way through their everyday interactions. Makes me think above all else that there are infinity vastly different ways to interpret the pace and agency of the world around us and our own effect on it.

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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My Own Private Idaho — I'm not sure what I expected from this but it sure wasn't this baffling Shakespeare pastiche spliced into the middle of a faltering and hesitant gay-relationship story prefiguring Brokeback Mountain and Call Me By Your Name where across the board there's always some uncomfortable hedging aspect about the characters in play that makes their relationship not really what it seems to be.

quote:

The campfire scene, originally just three pages,[20] was expanded by Phoenix into an eight-page scene in which Mike professes his love for Scott, thereby making the character's homosexuality obvious, as opposed to Van Sant's more ambiguous original version. Phoenix described his process as his "own stream-of-consciousness, and this just happened to be one that was more than actor notes. Then Keanu and I refined it, worked on it, but it was all done quickly. It was something I wrote down a night, two nights, before, and then I showed it to Keanu and Gus. And Gus kept the whole thing. He didn't pare it down. It's a long scene."

That sure tracks, that scene felt as stylistically digressive as the whole Shakespeare thing did. And for me it had kind of the opposite effect on the sincerity of the movie that it maybe was meant to — like how in Victor/Victoria, there's this scene toward the end where King sneaks into Julie Andrews' apartment and spies on her in the bathroom and discovers that she's actually a woman, which means his later confession that he loves her even if she is a man — "I'm not a man" "I still don't care" — come off as cowardly and zero-stakes compared to if he'd actually taken that leap without knowing. I've always wondered whether that bathroom scene had been tacked on late in production or something when the studio got cold feet, but I've never been able to find out for sure. Ultimately it just makes it seem all the starker how such compromised stories are still the best we can hope for in "icons of LGBT+ cinema"


e: it was quite fun hearing Keanu Reeves doing the Shakespeare lines which fit in eerily well with the "loquacious SoCal surfer dude, most excellent" persona that he'd all but pioneered in Bill & Ted and was in the process of being iterated on by Wayne’s World

Data Graham fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Jul 15, 2023

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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Dunno what it is about Fantastic Mr. Fox but it has almost obsessive rewatchability for me, and I can hardly stand ever watching anything twice. One time I got on a train from NYC to DC and in the time it took to get there I'd watched it through almost three times.

Every little line of dialogue or frame of visuals is a joke with texture you want to pause and chew over. "His ears are cold." The "he's-all-weird" arm flappy gesture. The music. The trains roaming the room/countryside. The lawyer-office snarl-fight. Petey's song. "Because I'm LITTLE." The stars on the bandit hat. The wolf. The dance in the store.

Dammit I want to watch it again now

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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Big Trouble in Little China: somehow I never saw this until now, though I did see The Golden Child way back when and remember it being incomprehensibly unfunny. Amused that this is what it was up against in what had to be some weird case of pre-Volcano/Mars/Ant movie/space station TV show studio espionage. This one is a lot of fun and has plenty of good action and set design (and really good effects for the era too), and I dig the subversion of the macho white protagonist being a bumbling doofus who knocks himself the gently caress out before a fight scene.

What felt jarring to me in spite of everything is that even in 1986 it must have been a bit weird to treat "The Chinese" as some kind of mystical elven species who has access to special supernatural powers and gods that are unknown in the West. It really comes off strange today, unsurprisingly, but even at the time it must have felt like a weird kind of throwback to already-deprecated Fu Manchu type stuff.

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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Breetai posted:

The bit in the lo pan psychic battle where he starts wiggling his thumbs like he's holding a game controller is a gag at least 20 years ahead of its time.

Yeah! My eyebrows shot up at that lol

I did mental math watching that remembering that this was the year the NES came out and how pervasive home video game systems were already (mostly with joysticks rather than game pads), and I remember the other kids in my class were all talking excitedly about how humans would evolve huge thumbs in order to play video games better

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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Pandora's Box - I watched this as part of a rabbit-hole deep-dive that went like this:

Schitt's Creek (does in-show production of Cabaret) ->
Cabaret (has Liza Minelli as Sally Bowles whose hair/makeup/mannerisms are derived from Louise Brooks) ->
Pandora's Box

And for a silent movie from 1929, I was kind of floored by how "modern" it felt. Characters' gestures and facial expressions felt like things I could expect to see today. It's a far cry from something as broad and over-the-top gesticulatory as Metropolis; it's a down-to-earth character story where you'll get something like: she's sitting at a table and looks up to see the familiar face of an old chummy friend. She puts out her arms and tucks her chin down to her chest, theatrically looking up at her friend with a wide-open, upper-teeth-exposed grin and her eyes rolled upward to make oblique eye contact, her head pointed like a spear and her arms forming an anticipatory embrace as she silently makes a noise like "aaawwww, it's you!"

It's the kind of weird intricate full-body gesture I would have thought only must have originated in the 70s or later, but here it is in 1929. The whole movie felt "nearer" in a lot of ways than a lot of things I've seen that were made decades later.

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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Kingsman: The Secret Service - boy 2014 was a hell of a time in retrospect. Google Glass was a thing, Elon Musk was a smart person, table-surface touchscreens were the Future, and Oscar Pistorius hadn't been revealed as a murderer yet so having a henchman with blade legs was still cool and topical.

Samuel L Jackson must have wanted to play a Bond villain his whole life, but whose idea was that lisp? It really does not work

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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Barbie was super entertaining, and my main thing that I kept thinking about was how much fun it is to see a movie like this in a sold-out theatre, where you can share a laugh with 200 other people and feel like you're all part of a continuum in enjoying the mindset of the filmmakers, even if it's something as eclectic and iconoclastic as this.

First time I'd gone out since pre-pandemic, fwiw


E: the reviews that say it’s not for kids definitely have a point though; quite apart from any content concerns, it’s just going to be completely incomprehensible to anyone under like 14. There were some families full of little squalling kids there and I can’t imagine what must have been going through their heads

Data Graham fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Jul 30, 2023

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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Rashomon — had this in my list for a while, and I'm glad I finally got it under my belt so I can understand all the later remakes and homages. It feels like a more "modern" and complicated story in all the framing actors' dialogue than I might have expected; I think I imagined it being more oblique and Shakespearean than it is, i.e. more straightforward in the narrative(s) but more philosophical in the commentary. Of course there's plenty of that there too (all the running threads about faith in man and lying to oneself and human weakness etc). But I always enjoy watching something from many decades ago and finding that the characters are plenty approachable and (for lack of a better word) "normal" to modern eyes, in their interactions and motivations and dialogue, than they could have been (archetypical, didactic, one-dimensional, unrealistic).

One thing that struck me in light of my recent hand-wringing about adaptation and language and death-of-the-author is how Kurosawa apparently intended the film to end on an ominous downer note by having a dark thundercloud rolling in over the gate as the guy takes the baby home; but the weather didn't cooperate and they got good weather on the last day of shooting and now the movie ends on a happy sunshiney hopeful tone. What do we do with that? Evaluate the film's message in context of its production circumstances? Disregard the director's intention and very best efforts? lmao


e: also it's funny to see a "samurai" character presented not as some kind of superhuman swordsman, but just some rich toff who has a sword to show off like a sportscar but can barely use it. The final "duel" scene where there's no music and they're just crawling around in the mud throwing leaves and poo poo at each other like a couple of kids wrestling on the playground is one of the most believable fights I've ever seen on film

Data Graham fucked around with this message at 21:02 on Aug 6, 2023

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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I remember my dad telling me that the opening shot of him on the moving walkway at the airport (where it's tight-in and looks like he's just standing still and floating along without moving, then pulls out to show the context) made audiences go what the fuuuuuck.

That plus the "plastics" business made it all feel like a weird commentary on the dehumanizing nature of the incipient Future

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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Enemy Mine — I had no idea this movie existed

I'm still not sure this movie existed

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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Oof lol

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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Mat Cauthon posted:

The Fabelmans - How the gently caress did this not win best picture? I loved EEAAO but it was not a better film than this. Spielberg really lets all the formative traumatic childhood stuff hang out there way more than I expected, especially the part with Mitzi dancing in front of the headlights. Very good performances out of Rogen, Williams, and Dano which probably would've gotten more attention if they weren't overshadowed by Yung Spielberg and Hirsch. Perfect ending too.

Probably as good of a (moderately fictionalized) autobiopic as anyone could do. One of those rare movies that I wish I'd caught during the theatrical run.

Just watched it too. I particularly appreciated the "climactic" scene in the school hallway that is a spirited commentary on the dynamics of authorial intent and film criticism. "I don't care what you meant!"

And the final cameo is :discourse:

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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Blades of Glory — kind of wild that in 2007 it was still super-cool to do a whole movie built around a "lol gay" joke. I mean at least it's mostly limited to sight gags which is a step up from stuff like "Claustrophobic? Call me that again and I'll punch your lights out! I've never even looked at another man!" from TMNT, but there's still a goddamn lot of it and it's the source of 80% of the humor

Anyway what I kept wondering while watching it (and wikipedia tells me nothing) is, how did they do the skating stunts? Did Heder and Ferrell do their own skating for much/any of it? It didn't look like stunt doubles or trick shots/CGI for most of it. I wouldn't be totally surprised to find out that Heder was actually that good at skating (his dancing is legit pretty slick in ND, and he had to kind of pull his punches in the scene with the choreographer guy in BoG from the look of it), but I am not here to believe you that Will Ferrell can move with any kind of grace

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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Open Range - nice to see an ACAB Western for once

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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Top Gun: Maverick. I avoided this for a while, not sure why; probably just was in no mood for something that suggested itself to be as ooh-rah as I imagined it to be. And now that I've seen it, I guess I needn't have worried (given how carefully—even comically—they avoided even suggesting who the "enemy" power was), but my bigger question is, okay, and?

Like, yeah, it's really well done, and it deserves all the critical praise, and may indeed be better than the original. But that's because it's basically a remake of the original. Like, almost shot-for-shot. Every single character and every single scene has a drop-in replacement, whether Hamm for Skerritt or that smirking guy for Kilmer, or the choice of songs to play around the pool table in the bar, or the motorcycle to the San Diego house or the gauzy sex interlude (its funny middle-aged awkwardness being a welcome bonus in that case). The beach football stand-in for the volleyball scene definitely carefully elides the vaunted homoeroticism of the original, which of course to me just makes it less interesting, and I don't mean it like that lol. Ultimately I just kept finding myself wondering just what it is they were trying to accomplish. It doesn't even try to be a different story than the original, which itself was already a whole thing about fathers and sons and redemption/vindication of a headstrong maverick (lmao) personality in the face of a hidebound by-the-book military bureaucracy. By which it certainly does the job of being a Navy ad appealing to would-be rebels without causes who believe themselves to be the Chosen Ones of their particular hero's journeys and each thinking they'll find purpose as a subversive cog in the military machine, bringing it down from the inside, just like a million others who all believe they're doing exactly the same thing. But I feel like that can't have been its only purpose, in which case what else? Showing off how good Tom Cruise is at aging? Though I suppose even if the only thing it really does accomplish is giving Kilmer a nice poignant send-off, I'll take it.

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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It was just hysterical when they would throw in stuff like the shot of Cruise staring wistfully in through the bar windows while Great Balls of Fire plays on the jukebox. Which apparently was an afterthought by the director, as though we didn't get the pervasiveness of the copy-paste enough already, he just had to drive home that "this is perhaps the ur-example of 80s nostalgia pandering to aging Atari 2600-playing, Metallica-tshirt kids wishing the world had never gotten complicated and weird"

I started putting together a list a while ago of all the "reboots that are really continuations with the same actors" and gave up when it started getting too drat long


- Twin Peaks
- Bill & Ted Face the Music
- Jay & Silent Bob Reboot
- Cobra Kai
- Star Wars
- Full House
- Punky Brewster
- Animaniacs
- Indiana Jones(?)
- Coming 2 America
- Roseanne
- Murphy Brown
- Mad About You
- Gilmore Girls
- Arrested Development
- Rocky
- Rambo
- Terminator(?)
- Blade Runner
- Tron
- Independence Day
- Top Gun
- Pee-Wee’s Big Holiday
- Wayne’s World / Uber Eats
- Melrose Place (2009)

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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Some of them are pretty drat good and I am glad we have them (Twin Peaks for sure), but at a certain point it’s like, okay that’ll do

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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I was being blurry with my definitions. TP seemed to fit in with the general trend of “guess what, the gang’s all back together, whether you expected it or not”

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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Zorba the Greek. Lol they made that dance the gently caress up for this movie, and now everybody in Greece dances it for tourists like it's a centuries-old tradition? That's like finding out the hula didn't exist until Elvis did those movies in Hawaii

Anyway good movie, kind of a proto Call Me By Your Name in shape at least. I guess the crux of the story, or at least the bit I found most memorable:

- What good are all your drat books if they can't explain why people suffer and die?
- Well, they tell us of the agony of men who can't answer those kinds of questions.
- gently caress you and gently caress your agony

Which I'm not totally sure what to do with; I dunno if it's anti-intellectualism or just a primal scream of pain (after all the death he's reacting to happens because of small-mindedness and superstition). Maybe both. Either way it's yet another character archetype among many for a generation to have picked from as role models, and it's fun and a little harrowing to think what audiences today would take from it. Better this self-centered but ultimately harmless and genial raconteur than your cavalcade of modern conmen and sociopaths whom people interpret as heroes of destiny, maybe a kind of precursor of them? I dunno

Data Graham fucked around with this message at 12:27 on Oct 2, 2023

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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Clipperton posted:

*NATO-adjacent
*Advanced military technology
*”Secret” nuclear program

Pretty sure it’s Israel?

Ah right, I should have been able to infer that from the snowy Lake Tahoe winter scenery

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Somehow kept missing this or only seeing little bits and pieces. Finally saw the whole thing and not feeling like I needed to really.

Love how they spell/pronounce it "Quartermain" throughout the entire movie, just totally oblivious to the spelling they get right exactly once, in the credits

Had to lol that it has almost exactly the same climactic scene (long distance shot in the snow) as Watchmen

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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Ender's Game: Not a reader of the book, but I listened through Corey Olsen's study of it and the adaptation and watched the movie just now so I could see it for myself. Based on what he chose to cover it feels like it hit most of the important points, and it was a well-structured and very good-looking movie, and since Card was involved in the production it isn't surprising that it feels like a pretty note-for-note depiction of what the text says. Be that as it may though, it's pretty joyless and didactic and not that much fun.

Given Card's shitheadedness I'm happy to put this on the shelf of Things To At Least Know About

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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Can I just say a crescendo is not a climax

it means "growing", it is something you put in music wherever you want it to gradually get louder

:goonsay: I know

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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I hate this :argh: but who am I to argue with Merriam-Webster

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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The Rum Diary is fun to show someone who thought he'd plumbed the depths of Depp/Thompson.

It's not as good as Fear & Loathing but only because it's trying to ~say something~ in between all the quips and one-liners. I find myself feeling self-conscious about whether I'm being asked to connect with it on a) the loldrughumor level or b) the personal-movie-relationships-plot level or c) the political level. It sure washes over you and makes you feel like you just got tossed around in the surf for a while and now are wondering what the hell happened, and that's kind of the point, but also it's not very satisfying. Unless the point of the whole continuity and meta-presentation between this as a prequel and F&L later is that you do your best to make a difference and maybe all you'll accomplish is establishing a few good character quirks and well-turned phrases, but if that's enough to get people thinking, that's a win.

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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Point Break for the first time in a while -

Holy poo poo Bigelow loves that long lens :swoon:

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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Miami Vice (2006) - wow this is one of the strangest directed movies I've ever seen. All lingering extreme close-ups on faces and eyeballs and boobs and floors. Or else it's shakycam action from the POV of someone right over everyone's shoulder, jumping around hectically from angle to angle. It's like Super COPS Cam or something. But weirder still is the editing of the music. It will play like an entire song end to end, fade it out, and start playing another song, right in the middle of a sex scene. And then the second song just keeps playing on into the next scene outdoors doing some unrelated action thing. Like they just left their iPod shuffle on continuous loop and forgot about it or something.

And then there's that cover of In The Air Tonight that plays over the intro to the final shootout scene (drat Mann does love his shootouts in shipping-container mazes I guess), which is so awful it makes what is clearly supposed to be an homage come off like a horrible joke


e: Oh I guess it's shot so weird because they were just learning about digital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomson_Viper_FilmStream_Camera

Data Graham fucked around with this message at 02:35 on Oct 22, 2023

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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Now I have to go back over the last couple months' worth of posts where I see Miami Vice has been discussed in these terms numerous times and it just whiffed past me because I hadn't seen it


e: someone posted this in another thread with the implication of :wtc: and I lolled when it came up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1_Lzxie5Qs

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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This is one nitpick but I have to mention it because it struck me as extremely silly at the moment and I'm not sure if it should have. When they go in to talk with the drug kingpin near the beginning and Rico threatens to blow all of them up with a grenade he has, is that not the dumbest and worst bluff ever? I am no hardbitten negotiator or card sharp nor do I have any idea how to even begin to think like one, but all that was going through my head during that scene as the guards all have their guns pointed at Sonny and Rico and he's like "fine, go ahead, shoot, I'll just blow us all up" was that nobody could possibly believe him for a microsecond. Who could not be bluffing unless they're suicidal? Who goes into a drug deal negotiation ready to die?

If it's the Joker his whole deal is he's clearly crazy enough to do it. These are just some dudes the kingpin is asking for their references

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story - okay what in the name of gently caress even is this movie. I'm so confused

Like, is it supposed to play like a slapstick comedy? I don't know how I'm supposed to be reacting to these scenes. One minute he's having an impromptu movie-style kung-fu battle with a bunch of schlubby line cooks from his restaurant to the strains of Green Onions, then he's fighting a duel with a big bad heavy for the right to teach kung-fu in San Francisco in spite of a panel of solemn greybeards who had resolved that they shouldn't teach it to whites because they are the enemy, and then he's fighting the heavy's brother who randomly shows up on the set of a movie to do a fully choreographed one-on-one battle while nobody intervenes. I've seen cartoons that are more subtle in the writing of their dialogue, and I'm talking about the kind ten-year-olds watch. I don't know if this is supposed to feel like a serious biopic or if it's trying to sell the idea that Bruce Lee just lived a constant life of backflips and kipups where his shirt just bursts off his oiled-up body right in time to beat up some sailors, like for him that was Tuesday

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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I went to Lviv for work and the host team took us to an escape room place that had one setup themed on The Game

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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Gaius Marius posted:

Lego Batman Movie Pretty fun for what it is. Certainly better than Snyder's idiotic take on the Batman franchise. I've never seen the Lego movie so I was actually pretty surprised with how fun and inventive the brickwork was in the film, writing could've been a little tighter and the film should've been a little more batman and a little less WB ip

You should definitely see the Lego Movie itself too. Its give-no-fucks meta treatment of Batman was one of the funniest things about it, and I almost think doing a whole movie about "that" Batman kinda belabored the joke out of existence. (All the other IP being in it is the only thing that saves it from that really.) If you can go into it with fresh eyes it's fantastic.

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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Jerry & Marge Go Large: My parents saw this on the plane on the way to Thanksgiving and liked it so much they had us all watch it together (also they wanted to see it again with subtitles because the audio on the plane sucked).

It's a pretty lightweight feel-good movie all in all, but what I enjoyed about it was the meta-level reading, in that it's basically the "good universe" version of Breaking Bad. Retirement-age clever guy (played by Bryan Cranston lol) leaves his long-time job and embarks on a life of "crime" leveraging his not insignificant talents that he wants to exercise for personal/ego reasons. But in this case he's doing it with the explicit and earnest purpose of benefiting his small town and friends and family, rather than just himself. You know how Schitt's Creek is basically Arrested Development except that they learn how to be better people and it leaves you feeling good instead of wishing they would all die? It's like they specifically set out to do that but with Breaking Bad. I asked around and nobody in the fam has seen BrBa (it's on a couple of their to-watch lists) but I felt like I was being let in on some kind of extremely obvious SNL-tier joke.

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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The Return of the Pink Panther: Lol I guess it stands to reason that people think France is communist when there is a portrait of Lenin in his apartment

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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Nacho Libre: Holy crap I had no idea this was by the Hesses and has more in common with Napoleon Dynamite stylistically than with all those goofy-character Will Ferrell/Adam Sandler type movies of the late 2000s.

It also doesn't age very well and it's not all THAT funny, but it's better than I guess I assumed it would be. My brother finds it highly quotable, though I can't remember any one-liners from it, and it didn't strike me as a "vibe" the way ND does so I don't know if I can see rewatching it. Glad I saw it though

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: OK it isn't my first time obviously but my brother's wife and daughters hadn't seen it or any Indy film prior to him recently making them watch them Clockwork Orange style, and we did this one to fill the turkey trance evening. It's interesting seeing it from the perspective of someone who didn't grow up with the idea of "Indiana Jones" just being a super-cool concept always hovering around on the edges of consciousness, an archetype to aspire to.

Through modern, fresh eyes Indy just looks like a weird hypocritical psycho. And certainly he is, as I'm sure a ton of scholarship has concluded; his "archaeology" that amounts to colonialistic treasure-hunting and grave-robbing where he takes what he wants and throws the rest in a hole and sets it on fire just looks absolutely bizarre, especially to my nieces who have a thoroughly modern and global view of such things. "It belongs in a museum" yeah? Whose museum? Is private ownership like Coronado's his goal, is he just a mercenary for hire? What exactly is sane about not calling in a university-backed dig as soon as you find the catacomb under the X? Thinking about it the idea of Indy being the "good" archaeologist constantly at odds with the "evil" archaeologists feels as weird in retrospect as like, having the good rock band as the protagonists fighting the evil rock band, or the good tornado-chasing scientists facing off against the evil tornado-chasing scientists. Like what the gently caress.

At least it does a good job, maybe better than I'd remembered (as Raiders did too) of depicting the Nazis and Donovan/Elsa as an existential threat to civilization itself and its principles; not just cartoon baddies with funny accents, but morally twisted opportunists excusing and supporting the actions of people who are not inherently monsters but human beings choosing to do monstrous things. Positioning them as implicitly opposed to "everything the Grail stands for" is a bit of an elision but it makes you fill in the blanks yourself and doesn't really let you dismiss it without trying.

The comedy is all still great and the genre shifting between Raiders/Temple/Crusade is still a lot of fun from a cinemaphile standpoint (Crusade and its unexpected turn toward slapstick comedy after the throwback-ponderous-sullen-doom-adventure-with-flashes-of-mad-lols of Raiders and the problematic-snake-eyes-horror of Temple is quite a roller-coaster ride), but we couldn't turn on subtitles for some reason and we found that between Ford's baritone mumbling and Connery's brogue the new viewers couldn't understand more than like 20% of the dialogue. I guess this skewers my theory that movies and TV have grown denser in recent years such that subtitles are all but a requirement; apparently it was always this way and we just sort of expected to miss a whole lot of the movie's content on the first watch, and we never expected to have the luxury of being able to pause or roll back or rewatch on a whim. Maybe it's us that have changed.

I am reminded of why it seemed to strange to me that they did a fourth Indy movie and this one was not patently the series finale, because wouldn't he (and Jones Sr) be immortal now? That seemed like the obvious conclusion when I saw it as a kid and it seemed like a foregone conclusion that they simply couldn't make any more.

At least now they know where the memes come from

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

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Oh yeah, I remember that one. I should give it a re-listen

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Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

📈📊🍪😋



Last Crusade is fuckin great, it leans into the comedy side and there are places where it's obvious they're trying to one-up the big climactic freakout effects of the earlier movies and it doesn't really work (i.e. the grail-aging), but it really does just hit on all cylinders all the way through. Still, if Raiders comes across as "forgettable camp" then Last Crusade probably isn't going to reverse that impression

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