Movie Time 2.0: TT mini reviews

[Phantoon]

Probably one of the best posts in TT history.

Yeah, I've only just seen it and I think it's a strong candidate.

It's at times like this that I question death of the author. Knowing the author in this case adds understanding that can't be achieved through the text alone, which results in people misunderstanding the point, then criticising the text based on their flawed reading.

The Problem Of Susan always seemed like a particularly strange misreading of the book though. It focuses too much on the literal "nylons and parties", when it's instead a shorthand for worldly concerns. She's not doomed because she wants fun, she's doomed because she wants to be Paris Hilton.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

The Equalizer 2 is more of the same pretty much. The story is pretty basic stuff, although the fact that it's less about protecting the little guy as part of the main plot is less fun. Denzel kills it and Fuqua is pretty decent at directing a movie. That's... really about it, though. If you like Denzel fucking dudes up after speaking to them in a particularly Denzel way, then you will be in good hands.

 

[Exposition Owl]

She's not doomed because she wants fun, she's doomed because she wants to be Paris Hilton.

I don’t think it’s exactly that, either (unless I’m misreading what Paris Hilton means, which is entirely possible, and even likely). Susan wants to be a Respectable Adult, which means fitting in with all of the other Respectable Adults, and not being anything that a Respectable Adult shouldn’t be. If that means pretending that the years of her life she spent saving and ruling a magical land with her siblings didn’t really happen, so be it: Respectable Adults don’t believe in such things, and what is her own experience compared with the judgment of society? Magical lands populated with talking animals sound childish, not adult, and Susan, like many teenagers, is desperately afraid of being considered childish. A famous quotation from Lewis sheds some light on her behavior here: “When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

Now, Lewis absolutely was a thoroughgoing misogynist. Almost his entire experience of women was of his male friends’ wives, who (in his view) always wanted to talk about boring social stuff when he and his friends were having literary and academic conversations. The fact that women could absolutely participate in those fun conversations if they weren’t deliberately excluded from academic circles never seemed to occur to him, despite the fact that Dorothy L. Sayers was a close friend of his. By the time Lewis wrote the Narnia books he’d gotten a bit better, but it’s still there underneath, and I haven’t seen anything in his letters that suggests that he ever really confronted and interrogated those hateful assumptions about women. That underlying contempt for the role that mid-20th-century Britain assigned to women, and Lewis’s own participation in that collective societal judgment, do a lot to obscure the point that Lewis is making here. Still, the point is actually a good one: many times, your culture will try to tell you that things that manifestly happened to you didn’t really happen, because those things don’t fit in with the story the culture tells about the world. If you let that cultural story become more important to you than the truth, you’ve betrayed yourself.

 

[Phantoon]

I mean, that's just an extensive ad hominem. "Bearing in mind C S Lewis is a misogynist, I can read this as misogynist"

 

[Exposition Owl]

I mean, that's just an extensive ad hominem. "Bearing in mind C S Lewis is a misogynist, I can read this as misogynist"

If we're talking about interpreting something a particular author wrote, I think that bringing other things he wrote into the conversation is a fair and even necessary move. There are a lot of passages in Lewis's other work that I can only read as misogynistic, and misogynistic in this particular way. For example, how else can I interpret the passage in The Great Divorce in which the female damned spirit talks about the fun she gets from subjecting her husband to an endless social calendar that's under her control? How else can I interpret the character of Jane Studdock in That Hideous Strength, whose entire character arc is about learning to let go of her ambition toward an academic career and to embrace being a wife and mother and the company of other women? How else can I interpret this passage in the "Friendship" section of The Four Loves, in which, after making brief but laudable remarks about how women ought to be allowed to study, Lewis observes at length how he sees things working in practice:

Spoiler: Block quote

"Something much more painful happens when it is the men who are civilised and and the women not, and when all the women, and many of the men too, simply refuse to recognise the fact.

"When this happens we get a kind, polite, laborious and pitiful pretence. The women are 'deemed' (as lawyers say) to be full members of the male circle. The fact--in itself not important--that they now smoke and drink like the men seems to simple-minded people a proof that they really are. No stag-parties are allowed. Wherever the men meet, the women must come too. The men have learned to live among ideas. They know what discussion, proof, and illustration mean. A woman who has had merely school lessons and has abandoned soon after marriage whatever tinge of 'culture' they give her--whose reading is Women's Magazines and whose general conversation is almost wholly narrative--cannot really enter such a circle. She can be locally and physically present in it in the same room. What of that? If the men are ruthless, she sits bored and silent through a conversation that means nothing to her. If they are better bred, of course, they try to bring her in. Things are explained to her; people try to sublimate her irrelevant and blundering observations into some kind of sense. But the efforts soon fail and, for manners' sake, what might have been a real discussion is deliberately diluted and peters out in gossip, anecdotes, and jokes. Her presence has thus destroyed the very thing she was brought to share. She can never really enter the circle because the circle ceases to be itself when she enters it--as the horizon ceases to be the horizon when you get there. By learning to drink and smoke and perhaps to tell risqué stories, she has not, for this purpose, drawn an inch nearer to men than her grandmother. But her grandmother was far happier and more realistic. She was at home talking real women's talk [emphasis mine] to other women and perhaps doing so with great charm, sense and even wit. She herself might be able to do the same. She may be quite as clever as the men whose evening she has spoiled, or cleverer. But she is not really interested in the same things, or mistress of the same methods. (We all appear as dunces when feigning an interest in things we care nothing about.)

"The presence of such women, thousands strong, helps to account for the modern disparagement of Friendship. They are often completely victorious. They banish male companionship, and therefore male Friendship, from whole neighborhoods. In the only world they know, an endless prattling 'Jolly' replaces the intercourse of minds. All the men they meet talk like women while women are present." [Lewis, The Four Loves, (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1988), pp. 74-5.]

My point is not to beat up on C.S. Lewis. His writing was the first experience I had with the fact that you can do theology in a way that connects up with other fields of intellectual endeavor; even if I have a lot of criticism for some of his ideas now, he was really formative for me. I just think it's important for me, as a dude, to acknowledge that the misogyny that women (such as my wife, who loves Narnia beyond all description) see in Lewis's writing really is there, and to think hard about where it influences what Lewis has to say.

 

[Octopus Prime]

I would deem Transformers: Rise of the Beasts to be… the third best Transformers movie, behind the 80s one and Bumblebee. The rest simply aren’t in contention.

It’s a good time at the movies! And it handily addressed the problems I thought I’d have had with the story before it became an issue police and military personnel are considered minor impediments to the heroes at best and represent 100% of the human casualties of the movie because they’re tertiary antagonists, and someone asked if the ancient alien robots who had been there since before the dawn of time were responsible for all the ancient wonders of the world and they’re kind of insulted that people would denigrate ancient Peruvian artistic talents, and the Transformers spent almost the entire movie in robot mode so there was basically no product placement in this 2 hour long toy commercial

On the other hand, there’s a scene early on where a child complains about not being able to beat Bowser, and there are SMB1 sounds coming out of a regular Gameboy, so I hope to some day find it in my heart to forgive the entire production team; but I can’t today

 

[R.R. Bigman]

Has anyone here seen Dark City? I just did, and I had a big, dumb smile on my face the whole time. It was not a good movie, yet it was so much more than I was expecting.

 

[Bongo]

Dark City is very good. Did you manage to avoid the cut where the opening titles include narration that immediately gives away the premise, spoiling the slow-burn reveal?

 

[R.R. Bigman]

Dark City is very good. Did you manage to avoid the cut where the opening titles include narration that immediately gives away the premise, spoiling the slow-burn reveal?

Nope, old Kiefer spelt out the premise right away for me. I was still blown away by the events that unfolded.

 

[YangusKhan]

Dark City is very good. Did you manage to avoid the cut where the opening titles include narration that immediately gives away the premise, spoiling the slow-burn reveal?

So, between Dark City and Blade Runner, that makes 2 sci-fi neo-noir films where studio execs mandated a narration, to the detriment of the overall film.

 

[Lokii]

I watched it just a couple weeks ago. Pretty good terrible film. Or a pretty terrible good film. One of the two.

 

[Purple]

Dark City is one of my all-time favorite movies, leading me to watch everything else that writer/director has done, which has admittedly lead to some pretty mixed results. I still say people are sleeping on Gods of Egypt.

Meanwhile I've never really watched any of the Child's Play movies, but after recently seeing this clip from the TV series I was Curious:

So I WAS gonna go watch the whole series already but fate is conspiring against my ability to watch movies so I couldn't find the original 3 and just watched Bride and Seed of Chucky.

And... yeah. The latter legitimately is about the genderfluid child of two killer dolls. It's not really handled in the best way. For a good chunk of the movie we've just kinda got their parents arguing over their gender and whether to call them Glen or Glenda (which is DEFINITELY an intentional reference), while they initially seem pretty disinterested, but later they do just go "I like being a boy and I like being a girl, can I just do both?" which would be pretty great if the ending didn't go with this odd well, when we impregnated your mom's voice actress* to get a more human vessel to transfer your soul into she ended up having twins, a boy and a girl, so, let's just have you possess them both rather than have to choose" thing. Apparently the TV series though has this lead to just having these two nonbinary kids around for a bit before eventually getting re-dolled into a single body and rolling with a more consistent name. So that's cool.

* And oh yeah there's this whole other thing going on where Seed opens with people making an in-universe movie about the events of Bride and there's this whole wacky meta thing- "wow I should totally transfer my soul into the body of this actress they got to play me, she sounds just like me and looks like I did before I got turned into a doll!" "Also I was in Bound!"

... and Tubi here has decided to just jump on in and autoplay Curse of Chucky which seems to be... rejecting the absurd cartoonish direction and trying to go back to straight-faced horror and meh.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Don't Breathe 2 is... a choice. Independent of the first movie, it's a decent gory action thriller but even though the film tries to acknowledge the main character is a monster, what made the first movie interesting is having a character turn the table on "bad guys" only to reveal he isn't just more capable, he's far more monstrous. The film has a few twists that point to something similar but here he is mostly the antihero rather than a villain and considering what we learn about him in the first movie... The film even makes sure that is clear, too, but it reminds me about how the sequel to Sicario is a straight up action movie in comparison to the bleak original first movie.

On it's own, I will say, the double twist sn't too surprising but it also makes the other characters monstrous and awful in a pretty unique way that I feel like I haven't seen in a film in a while and we are all in on seeing "the Blind Man" really fuck them up.

 

[Octopus Prime]

It was a weekend of misleadingly described Horror Comedies this weekend

I wanted to watch The Howling, but couldn’t find it streaming so I settled for the numerically closest thing I could find; it’s sequel The Howling 2: Your Sister is a Werewolf. In other markets it was retitled “Howling 2: Stirba”, which is perhaps a more accurate title but definitely doesn’t do as good of a job of establishing the tone. It’s a movie where Christopher Lee is a werewolf hunter who wants to bring down the goddess/queen of all werewolves before her 10000th birthday which will apparently make ever werewolf in the world go into a feeding frenzy. It *clearly* didn’t have anything approaching the budget of the original, as the only decent creature effects were reused shots from the original (except for one of the werewolf sex scenes, which is clearly where the filmmakers care and focus went; and was really undercut by everyone making really awkward barking noises). It may not have been a film with a particularly hard won pedigree, but it definitely is a movie with some astounding fashion choices;

The other was Bodies Bodies Bodies, which I didn’t like so much while I was watching it, but came around to adoring in the cold light of day afterward. It’s about a bunch of sexy 20-somethings (and also Lee Pace) who get together for a party during a hurricane and someone starts picking them off one by one. “Comedy” is kind of a misnomer for a description since most of the jokes are the sheer degree to which everyone is incompetent and awful, but the ridiculous degree to which they all suck is a delight; the entire denouement of the survivors putting together all the clues which immediately devolved into them airing increasingly petty grievances, and also learning that half the deaths were self inflicted accidents or that the clues were *complete nonsense* was a definite highlight.

Went in expecting Clue, and got Big Lebowski

 

[Phantoon]

Has anyone here seen Dark City? I just did, and I had a big, dumb smile on my face the whole time. It was not a good movie, yet it was so much more than I was expecting.

Dark City is a film that did what The Matrix does. But better. First. On The Matrix's own sets.

 

[Voncaster]

Yeah but the Dark City doesn't have Ted Theodore Logan.

 

[Torzelbaum]

And neither of them have Bill S. Preston, Esq.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

It's really how Grand Piano trumps both of them.

I watched Mulan for the first time. It's fine. Some of the stuff feels based on older cliches but there is definite intent to have Asian characters mostly played by Asian actors (interestingly, Harvey Fierstein only agreed to do this movie when he was assured of this. Obviously, we've learned more since then but it was a good take). There's only one memorable song, sadly but it's a pretty strong one, especially for a training montage. You can see though the animation is great, some of the magic is wearing thin, though this is better than the completely misguided Pocahontas.

Anyone looking for a solid horror comedy with both elements working... well, it has some flaws but Deadstream is mostly very fun and good. A lot of modern horror movies are self-serious treatise on grief and loss but this is a classic mix of Evil Dead and the "awful person gets what he deserves" catharsis of Tales from the Crypt. Here, the premise is a completely obnoxious youtuber who has just been re-platformed and re-monetized (for reasons revealed in the third act) decides to spend a night in a haunted house as one of his stunts. As you expect, things go bad.

The lead (who is also co-director) is REALLY good at taking on the fully realized aura of youtube guy I could not stand watching. He's got the side-eyed sarcastic man-child on lock. I think my problem with the comedy is it's such a great recreation but the comedy beyond that... there isn't a lot. It's more about tone than jokes, which is fun. That said, there are good bits and it gets into a really Evil Dead-inspired zone in the last act without feeling like another imitator. I also appreciate the trailer obliquely references some major plot points without giving anything away, which I appreciate. Yeah, we see some of the freaky ghosties but there's a lot it doesn't let on. I will also say, I love the reveal that the main character and the evil ghost actually have a lot in common but the build up made me think that the film was going to end with the lead turning into an Satanic undead youtuber now collecting souls as subscribers, which could have been fun. Maybe in the sequel..
Deadstream gets slightly too talky in the last act in the way that Dr. Who can (I love Dr. Who but sometimes it becomes tell don't show) but mostly it is a fun Sam Riami-inspired ride and the found footage gimmick doesn't wear out it's welcome.

 

[Phantoon]

Yeah but the Dark City doesn't have Ted Theodore Logan.

To be fair that is a grievous strike against Dark City

 

[Phantoon]

I'm watching Titanic again for the first time in years. It's a brilliant film, and juggles its two stories expertly. Cameron's knowledge really shines through, there's never been a more expensive passion project*

*OK, Avatar is more expensive, but there was less physical danger in the research. It's the result of an actual obsession rather than a fandom

 

[Rascally Badger]

Asteroid City is top tier Wes Anderson. A little bit of a spoiler of the set up, Asteroid City is a play within a play (within a play?) about a family stuck in a tiny town, dealing with grief. And its about actors trying to portray grief. And its about an alien.

I loved it.

 

[Octopus Prime]

Evil Dead Rise is a solid little spooky film. I prefer the series when it leans into Horror Comedy rather than Regular Horror (I felt deceived when I saw Lily Sullivan was the lead, but then I remembered that it wasn’t the Comedy Bang Bang regular), but it did what it did very well.

much like Hellraiser, I guess the lesson to be taught here is “Don’t bleed on cursed demonic artifacts”, and also “Demons are friggin’ assholes”

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Saw the Russian classic Alexander Nevsky by Eisenstein about the historic figure/folk hero rousing Novgorod to defend itself from German invaders. It's a film that's pretty upfront in that it's a propaganda movie about World War II and going over to kick some German ass and it really makes it hard to separate itself from the "rallying the troops" style. But it is often a rousing old timey and morally simplistic war movie and as one might expect from the man who invented the montage, it's a very well put together piece of work.

 

[Adrenaline]

Strangely, I watched that last night. Definitely the lesser of Eisenstein's historical work compared to Ivan the Terrible.

 

[FelixSH]

I watched Get Real, a british 1998 movie about a gay teen boy coming out story. It was nice and sweet, and I did enjoy the humor. There is bullying, but most people in the movie are generally decent, it stays generally light-hearted.

I'm always surprised how many British words I don't know.

 

[Exposition Owl]

I'm always surprised how many British words I don't know.

Do you get more exposure to U.S. English than to British English in Austria, then?

 

[FelixSH]

I'm pretty sure in school, we learn US English. But this is only a guess, based on me being slightly confused by words and concepts, when listening to British English. But I'm mainly thinking of insults, or stuff like "Blimey" (I think that's a British word?), or that tea isn't just a drink, but a meal (I guess?).

But also, our media in general, when it's imported, comes mainly from the US, especially before streaming became a thing. Cartoons, sitcoms, movies, that all mainly comes from the US. British shows are more like hidden gems. Like, I didn't learn about Dr. Who until I, dunno, found Talking Time, I guess.

So, strong US influence, which makes me sure that we learn that English in schools.

 

[Kirin]

Saw the Russian classic Alexander Nevsky by Eisenstein about the historic figure/folk hero rousing Novgorod to defend itself from German invaders. It's a film that's pretty upfront in that it's a propaganda movie about World War II and going over to kick some German ass and it really makes it hard to separate itself from the "rallying the troops" style. But it is often a rousing old timey and morally simplistic war movie and as one might expect from the man who invented the montage, it's a very well put together piece of work.

That’s the one with the Battle on the Ice scene, innit? With a bangin score by Sergei Prokofiev?

I used that piece as bgm for a boss battle in a custom Little Big Planet level. So there’s your totally random tangent for the day I guess.

 

[Exposition Owl]

I'm pretty sure in school, we learn US English. But this is only a guess, based on me being slightly confused by words and concepts, when listening to British English. But I'm mainly thinking of insults, or stuff like "Blimey" (I think that's a British word?), or that tea isn't just a drink, but a meal (I guess?).

But also, our media in general, when it's imported, comes mainly from the US, especially before streaming became a thing. Cartoons, sitcoms, movies, that all mainly comes from the US. British shows are more like hidden gems. Like, I didn't learn about Dr. Who until I, dunno, found Talking Time, I guess.

So, strong US influence, which makes me sure that we learn that English in schools.

Interesting! Thanks for the information. As a person from the U.S., it can be easy to forget how much our culture gets everywhere--I remember being kind of embarrassed about all the posters for stupid U.S. movies I saw when I was living in France.

For the record, regarding whether you learned British or American English at school, how would you translate "Aufzug" (in the sense of something in a building that you can take instead of the stairs) into English? How about "Kofferraum" (as in, the part of a car where you put luggage)?

 

[Rascally Badger]

I really didn't like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. If you want to appreciate Spielberg as a director, watch any chase scene in any other Indiana Jones movie, and then watch one from this one. Ooof.