Bizarre that this was so successful at the Oscars, but it's very good.
(Spoilers) I thought the freeloading Kims were going to destroy the Parks and take over their lives but the film went off in some unpredictable directions, humanising the Kims in the process, and raising the level of the film beyond a horror story for the upper middle classes. For me the biggest fault is that the Parks were reasonably nice people, if a little snobbish. Better if they had more clearly been shown to be parasites in their own way.
► Show Spoiler
Isn’t that part it though? They don’t have to be evil people to play their part. They can just accept their status as a better class of human, and as long as those beneath them keep viewing each-other as the enemies they’ll always remain the parasites.
Bizarre that this was so successful at the Oscars, but it's very good.
(Spoilers) I thought the freeloading Kims were going to destroy the Parks and take over their lives but the film went off in some unpredictable directions, humanising the Kims in the process, and raising the level of the film beyond a horror story for the upper middle classes. For me the biggest fault is that the Parks were reasonably nice people, if a little snobbish. Better if they had more clearly been shown to be parasites in their own way.
► Show Spoiler
Isn’t that part it though? They don’t have to be evil people to play their part. They can just accept their status as a better class of human, and as long as those beneath them keep viewing each-other as the enemies they’ll always remain the parasites.
► Show Spoiler
Too subtle for me! It seems unbalanced - the Kims were a scheming bunch of freeloaders with some (but not many) redeeming features whereas the Parks were quite nice, if snobbish/sheltered. Perhaps if Mr Parks' job was obviously exploiting the poor.....
paddy no 11 wrote:Tenet - no, just can't take anymore Nolan - having to spend hours to work out who, was, what, where, and when does not make a good film
Thought Tenet was great! Really interesting idea. Obviously it can't really work, but it's a crazy and mind-stretching film.
The Matrix 4. They put a lot of work into it, it's not terrible ... but they really shouldn't have made this. I'm not against the idea of adding to the trilogy, but it adds nothing.
Don't Look Up. An excellent satire. It's not non-stop gags but it is amusing. Also thought-provoking and frighteningly plausible. Don't believe the critics, they seemed to have been expecting a screwball comedy.
Don't look up is a good film to kill a quiet Sunday night. Funny and biting satire.
The latest Spiderman is a genuinely great film and really rescues Marvel phase 4 which has been increasingly shit up until Spidey.
Red Notice with The Rock and Ryan Reynolds has been panned by critics and rotten tomatoes but it doesn't deserve all that. It's daft, sure, and the actors are never going to win awards, but it's good daft and entertaining and I would definitely recommend if you have kids that need entertained for a couple of hours.
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It was so much easier to blame Them. It was bleakly depressing to think They were Us. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.
cashead wrote:Took advantage of the Disney+ to watch:
Black Widow - better than I thought it would be and much more substance than anticipated
Shang-Chi - eh
Also braved the cinemas to watch:
No Time To Die - loved it
Dune - stop stop I can only get so erect
Also VPN+Shudder to watch:
Gongjiam: Haunted Asylum - it's alright
Also V/H/S/94 - not as good as the original, better then V/H/S/2 and just makes V/H/s/Viral look like an even bigger turd.
I quite enjoyed Shang Chi. I mean, it wasn't outstanding, but it was a perfectly entertaining example of the genre. I would've put it a similar sort of level as Black Widow and without the distraction of Ray Winstone doing a "Russian" accent.
Dune was good then? I'm always nervous about adaptations of books I like, but the casting for it was so perfect that I worry they had probes in my head to get what I think the characters look like. Didn't manage to get out to the cinema though with plague et al.
cashead wrote:Yeah, I really enjoyed Dune. Keep in mind though, that it's only the first half of the novel adapted, so don't expect to see Feyd-Rautha, Princess Irulan or Alia Atreides at any point.
I'd heard that and thought it a really good decision by Villeneuve - the book's just too long to fit into one film unless you go LotR extended-edition style and have a 4.5 hour cut.
Dune is very good. The kind of grown-up sci fi we don't often get.
It's mostly faithful to the book (as far as I remember). On the negative side, it doesn't seem colourful enough, somehow. Certainly more drab-looking than Lynch's effort. And (as in the book) the story gets a bit slow in the middle (ie the second half of this film).
The French Connection. Okay its a classic but it still stands up and has some brilliant scenes, great dialogue and a commanding central performance from Hackman.
It’s not even so much the dark and gritty angle that does it. It goes pretty hard at that style for the first hour or so, and I was actually quite in to it, then succumbs to all the same bullshit that makes pretty much every superhero/comic-book film complete garbage.
It has to have its quota of sappy moments, heavy-handed yet shallow political commentary, romantic scenes, and the inevitable last act simply being a trailer for the next one. I don’t know how people put themselves through all the marvel shit.
Overall same as the Nolan ones really, does some super rad stylised stuff and but gets caught between being cool, gritty and just doing the same dumb camp shit from the 90s, whilst pretending to be incredibly smart.
The best parts of the film in terms of style and entertainment tend to be the parts that really don’t make any sense within the story. I have nobody but myself to blame for going to see it though and did I actually enjoy quite a few parts.
Numbers wrote:The French Dispatch - This is good viewing, Benicio Del Toro is great in it despite having virtually no dialogue.
Does it matter ?. The guy is totally unintelligible in The Usual suspects but he's still brilliant. Yaamuthfeucccker'
Watched 'Ready Player One' for the 2nd time last night. It's an odd movie.
I mean, it's an odd choice to watch twice. Did you not get enough, "Look, here's that other thing you used to love?" from the first viewing?
Having said that, I enjoyed the latest Spiderman which was basically the same, so I can't really talk.
Puja
There is more than saccharine nostalgia happening. There is also a polemic about dystopian society living within artificial existence.
But I am a sucker for nostalgia.
Not a DC sucker.
I watched the hilariously stupid Moonfall last night. It makes Armageddon and 2012 seem like Brian Cox documentaries.
I have to admit that I quite enjoyed the SciFi explanation, but the film made the mistake of using science that would be acceptable in Star Wars in a NASA setting.
Numbers wrote:Boiling Point with Stephen Graham, excellent acting.
Yeah this was fantastic I thought. One of those films I feel like basically everyone should see, whether you've worked in the service industry or not. The number of billion dollar blockbusters I've seen in the cinema recently and this blows them all out of the water. I know it's dumb to even make that comparison but whatever.
Was on 2 intercontinental flights, so got to watch 4 movies.
1) Dune. Excellent. A perfect blend of art and sci-fi, so for me very, very good. The sound direction was absolutely spot on.
2) Matrix. Absolute dog shite. Jesus. We didn't finish it. Just the idea of taking the concept and shitting on it. Wow. Awful.
3) No Time to Die. I cried. At a Bond movie. I thought it was excellent. And yes, I know, I cry freely at movies, but this is the only one of the 4 I cried during, and it was so powerful for me. Very well done. And to end it with that song. I had to turn it off, as I was sitting on a full plane and didn't want to be totally bawling my eyes out.
4) Knives Out. Chose it for a film that wouldn't get me thinking or crying, and it worked. A perfectly acceptable film with some quirky bits and some minor laughs. But for a comedy was somewhat lacking in the humour. A lot of that new breed of American humour that has tried to learn from British humour but missed the mark. So just ends up being...odd.
