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Movie Time 2.0: TT mini reviews

Purple

Purple

(She/Her)
It's also worth noting that... well not the PLOT since that involves resurrecting a weird monster goddess, but the opening premise is that our heroes are running an allegedly vegan diner that secretly serves patrons human meat, and they have a rival fake-vegan-diner-who-secretly-serves-patrons-human-meat owner constantly trying to steal their recipes.

Sadly, as was the case with my beloved House 2, producers didn't understand the glorious thing the director turned over, were upset, and did not let her make movies anymore. Fools with no vision says I!
 
ThornGhost

ThornGhost

lofi posts to relax/study to
(he/him)
I watched The Darjeeling Limited for the first time since release, and found it continues to be rather lovely and sad. I know it's generally considered a lesser Wes Anderson film, but I have no idea what that could actually mean. It comes from a time when he was a much more active director than recently and it is possible that we were just spoiled by his output.

When considering a film from 15 years ago about three white men in India you can imagine a lot of things going wrong on a cultural respect level. I have a hard time faulting Anderson too much for his treatment of the subject matter, however. The meta context of the film is that the brothers have some misplaced, western idea of a spiritual journey and fail to truly appreciate the culture they find themselves in until the plot forces them to do so.

Anderson has a habit of using people as scenery, which can be beautiful, or at least visually striking, but it is impossible to ignore the dehumanization of this technique when the surrounding cast is non-white. While the plot may treat these people with respect, the visual language does not always manage to do so.

When I saw this film in theaters 15 years ago, they played Hotel Chevalier, a short film set prior to the events of Darjeeling Limited, before the feature. Hulu does not do this and I watched it on YouTube after the movie. It makes me wonder which order is best.

In the end, an unquestionably beautiful film with great acting and a simple but moving story which gives characters time, but not too much time, to stew.
 
Rascally Badger

Rascally Badger

El Capitan de la outro espacio
(He/Him)
I saw a trio of pretty entertaining movies this weekend.

See How They Run is a fun little murder mystery starring Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan and interweaving around the Agatha Christie play The Mousetrap. It is not quite as clever as it thinks it is, but most of the jokes work and the mystery is good enough.

I also watched Vengeance on Peacock, written, directed and starring BJ Novak, about a New York guy who goes to Texas for the funeral of a girl he was hooking up with and starts making a podcast about investigating her death/mocking her family. It does a lot of red state/blue state stuff, with Novak's character being completely superficial, and some of his learned stereotypes being true. I don't know if it quite gets anywhere in the end, but I thought it was pretty entertaining.

Finally, I saw Confess, Fletch. Completely breezy and inconsequential. Jon Hamm is charming and the movie moves at a pretty quick clip. I was thoroughly entertained.
 
Johnny Unusual

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
The original Disney Pinocchio is one of those Disney movies so removed from current film story-telling that it's refreshing. Understandably, I feel like everything else, even when brilliant, follows a particular story-telling formula and Pinocchio is very basic and yet also spends the first 20 minutes singing in a room before Pinocchio really comes to life. Then it's three episodes, the first two being following the lead making variations on the same mistake but the three stories have a narrative disconnect; important to the hero's journey but they don't tie strongly together. And that's OK. I also kind of love how one of the biggest plot points happen off screen. Why did Gepetto even think to take a boat out and get eaten up by a whale? Monstro is a very well-animated death whale.
 
Octopus Prime

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
My favorite detail of that is that a letter is delivered informing everyone that Gepetto is presently inside a whale.

I can only assume that the interior of a whale has postal coverage
 
Johnny Unusual

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
I mean, it was written by the Blue Fairy, who had a lot of stuff going on at the time, I imagine, so she couldn't meet in person. I guess the implication if she showed up she could magic him out and maybe this is a test of the boy's humanity but I dunno, there are probably tests that, when failed, don't result in an old man and his pets starve to death in a whale.
 
Octopus Prime

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
Or else she’d been stealing Gepettos mail.

Either way, I don’t think we should be using her to judge someone’s morality.
 
Johnny Unusual

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
Still going through the Disney animated film canon and on the list was something called Valiant. It's terrible. Disney of the 2000s was clearly figuring its own identity out with 2D animation fading away and it lead to some pretty bad movies like The Wild and Meet the Robinsons (I know some people like that one but... I am not one of them), but while I still haven't seen Chicken Little or Dinosaur, so far this is the worst I've seen of the era. The animation looks awful and apparently the British company that worked on it spent two years, which is unfortunate since the quality is only slightly above generic direct-to-video CG movies.

It's also a movie that has nothing to say, no style to speak of (some of the animation in Pixar's early work might have aged poorly but at least they were well directed while this is no more ambitious than a Paw Patrol episode), it's humour is not only bad, it's generically bad. It's a film about messenger pigeons in WWII but it feels like the directors have only the most cursory understanding of the war. There's repeated talk about it being a fight for freedom but that doesn't really enter into the character's arc (who is a little guy who wants to be taken seriously and finally he does because that's the most boring kids film arc there is) and it makes the stakes less about saving people and more about proving you can do a thing. I can't believe the people who worked on this don't care because taking a movie is ridiculous amounts of work but... what happened? How does something this rough in every respect where characters decisions aren't based on characters so much as "well, time for the heroes friend to start being noble." Its a film where they seemed to lock into actually getting a first draft out there that they never bothered to refine anything. And making a film with the message "You can prove yourself in war because it's a big adventure" felt archaic and misguided when this film came out.

This movie is bad.
 
FelixSH

FelixSH

(He/Him)
I have never even heard about that movie. Which is weird, because I know the others you mentioned at least from commercials. Did this one simply never come out in Europe?
 
Johnny Unusual

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
No idea but the company Disney hired, Vanguard Animation, had a pretty small budget in comparison to its contemporaries and went onto make some pretty low profile films that are poorly reviewed in general. Their biggest hit was Space Chimps, a movie that sounds like it was made up as a bad kids movie within a TV show.

 
Adrenaline

Adrenaline

Post Reader
(He/Him)
Wikipedia says Walt Disney released it in North America, but other than that I don't know how it ended up in a list of their animated canon.
 
BEAT

BEAT

LOUDSKULL
(DUDE/BRO)
I WAS ON A BOAT AND I WATCHED A SHITLOAD OF MOVIES OF TOTALLY RANDOM GENRE AND QUALITY!

AND I KEPT NOTES IN A BIG OLD NOTEPAD DOT TXT!

HERE THEY ARE, TOTALLY UNEDITED EXECPT FOR LIKE WHEN I NOTICE OBVIOUS SPELLING ERRORS AND BOLDING THE TITLES LOL

VOLCANO

I think this movie is one of those thing you need to see if you wish to TRULY understand the 90s. In that way it's very similar to a PSX magazine, A tommy Hillfigure catalogue and secretly reading "Hatchet" during a 4th grade math class.

PIG

You know, I was expecting "John Wick but with Nicolas Cage" but instead I got a slow burn meditation on the joy of cooking and generational trauma. Which was very good!

I still totally want a John Wick but with Nicolas Cage tho.

I mean you can totally see it right? Hell it was already halfway there with the whole SECRET SOCIETY only instead of assassins its cooks.

PARADISE HILLS

Did I miss something or did they just never explain why the bad lady was Posion Ivy from Batman.

I don't THINK I missed anything.

It just seemed like a really big swerve from the established "body double murder cult" shit.

THE MOUNTAIN BETWEEN US

This went on for a weirdly long time after they made it out the woods. I get it. After going thorugh something like that, being back in the world would fuck you up something fierce.

X3: WHEN THE KIDS ARE UNITED
THEY WILL NEVER BE DIVIDED

What was that tweet about how "There's nothing wrong with us says Mutant with Super dick powers to mutant who is in excruciating pain every time he's in oxygen."

It's basically that.

On the whole it sucks slightly less than I remember, but that's not saying much. The Immortalization of "IM THE JUGGERNAUT BITCH" is a delightfully stupid footnote in meme history.

LOVE ON THE LIDO DECK AT SEA

No I didn't make that up Royal Caribbean literally made an entire hallmark channel original movie to advertise their fucking boats.

Super Fucked up.

IT'S ON AGAIN OH MY GOD HOW MANY TIMES HAVE THEY SHOWN THIS FUCKING THING?

AT THIS RATE I AM GOING TO BECOME THE LOVE ON THE LIDO DECK WHISPERER. THE CURSED SOUL THAT MAKES A 4 HOUR YOUTUBE BREAKDOWN OF THIS THING WHAT DID I DO TO DESERVE THIS?

THE LAST DUEL

I remember when this one came out and made almost zero dollars and Ridley Scott Went off on how yall are stupid assholes who only go to watch marvel bullshit, which prompted a cavalcade of HOTTT TAKES about how Ridley Scott was WRONG and BAD for saying that.

Well guess what the movie was fucking amazing and fucking brutal and fucking important and Ridley was right about everything.

MINORITY REPORT

I've heard about this movie for years, but never actually saw it. I was not prepared for the sheer volume of distracting early 00s CGI (We made plants act like snakes omg) and the bit where the bad guy shot the bad cop who was actually just the by the book cop didn't make any fucking sense. Also I slept through at least 20 minutes of it. Call the future cops IDGAF.

THE INDEPENDECE DAY SEQUEL NOBODY REMEMBERS

Every once in awhile it's important to watch a movie that's genuinely terrible.

UNDER THE SILVER LAKE

I didn't know David Dees made a movie.

ANASTASIA

BROKE: It's fucked up that they made a kids movie about an actual dead princess.
JOKE: It's fucked up that they made a kids movie about Rasputin's Rotting Corpse.
WOKE: It's fucked up that they made a kids movie about how the Russian Monarchy was cool and good.
BESPOKE: It's fucked up that since Disney bought Fox Anastasia is now literally a Disney Princess.
 
BEAT

BEAT

LOUDSKULL
(DUDE/BRO)
Out of all of that noise the one I'd probably rewatch is Under the Silver Lake, because my wasted years studying BAD WORLD bullshit tells me it's a surprisingly accurate depiction of what people in that particular insane headspace actually think. The idea that there's an entire world hidden outside of view, but you TOTALLY can expose the whole thing because this top secret society printed detailed instructions on how to reveal all their secrets on the back of a fucking cereal box.
 
Violentvixen

Violentvixen

(She/Her)
BEAT said:
ANASTASIA

BROKE: It's fucked up that they made a kids movie about an actual dead princess.
JOKE: It's fucked up that they made a kids movie about Rasputin's Rotting Corpse.
WOKE: It's fucked up that they made a kids movie about how the Russian Monarchy was cool and good.
BESPOKE: It's fucked up that since Disney bought Fox Anastasia is now literally a Disney Princess.
Click to expand...
Weird as that movie is, Once Upon a December is stellar. Someone told me that it's one of very few "main character" songs that's in a minor key and I have no idea if that's true but could see that being the case and making it more interesting.
 
Johnny Unusual

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
5 Broken Cameras

Decided to eat my vegetables with a sometimes harrowing first hand account documentary of Palestinians being pushed out by the military forces of the Israeli settlers. The footage was taken by a man who bought a camera to take video of his newborn son but ended up being used to film protests, as well as documenting his son growing up in that atmosphere. Through the film, he loses 5 cameras over 6 years but the footage survived. I always am slow to budge on watching films like these because it can be hard to get into the mood to watch such heavy material after a long day but I do recommend people check out this great work of advocacy journalism.
 
Rascally Badger

Rascally Badger

El Capitan de la outro espacio
(He/Him)
What I like about The Last Duel is that even in Matt Damon's version of this Rashomon his character clearly sucks.

I watched DC's League of Super-Pets. Maybe I'm an easy mark, you won't find a bigger fan of Krypto, but I thought it was delightful.
 
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Pajaro Pete

Pajaro Pete

(He/Himbo)
BEAT said:
PARADISE HILLS

Did I miss something or did they just never explain why the bad lady was Posion Ivy from Batman.

I don't THINK I missed anything.

It just seemed like a really big swerve from the established "body double murder cult" shit.
Click to expand...

nope, which, like, fine, not everything needs to be explained, but it sure is weird that even the main girl barely acknowledges it.
 
Sprite

Sprite

(He/Him/His)
Speaking as someone who has no nostalgia for the original, having first watched it last night, I liked Hocus Pocus 2 a lot more.

At one point they walk past a gay couple watching the first movie, so they clearly know their audience.
 
Rascally Badger

Rascally Badger

El Capitan de la outro espacio
(He/Him)
Don't Worry Darling has a lot of interesting ideas, and appears to just go for vibes rather than actually exploring them. Everything there is good, but the movie is let down by what is not there.
 
Pajaro Pete

Pajaro Pete

(He/Himbo)
My Best Friend's Exorcism was a flop. A horror comedy that doesn't really do either. They introduce an overtly comedic character in the last half hour, and he feels so tonally out of place with the rest of the movie I can't help but feel like either there were some heavy rewrites/ reshoots for his character as a last ditch effort to lighten the tone. On the plus side, the characters don't do a lot of quipping so.

The horror elements are largely not there either - the possession stuff is pretty standard things we've seen a dozen times now, the demon antics largely amount to extreme mean girl activities, but also the targets are characters who are really shitty and annoying, so it's like, do I really care what happens to them?

In conclusion, watch Jennifer's Body instead.
 
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