Movie Review Thread

[El Jefe]

I still think it's a better Batman movie than Batman movies.

[Phoebe]

[buckett]

Toni Erdmann (2016)

Decided to check out this Best Foreign Language nominee after seeing a couple rave reviews, and reading that it dragged Jack Nicholson out of retirement to star in an English-language remake. Ended up being totally surprised and delighted by this gem.

A short synopsis: retired school teacher Wilfried is a prankster, often sporting false teeth and a wig to adopt goofy personas. After his dog dies, he visits his corporate workaholic daughter, Ines, who lives in Bucharest, Romania. When his attempts to reconnect fall horribly flat, he puts on the teeth and wig and adopts the persona "Toni Erdmann" - a "life coach" who miraculously manages to orbit the corporate executives Ines works with. Ines, maybe too mortified to call her father out, plays along, allowing him a much closer look at her corporate lifestyle.

If this sounds like a schlocky late-era de Niro vehicle, the movie's brilliance is that the sentimentality is completely earned. While often very funny to the viewer, Wilfried/Toni's hijinks are always completely grounded in reality, earning at best bemused curiosity, or just as likely, complete annoyance by every other character in the film. Likewise, the writing goes to considerable lengths to humanize Ines, portraying her perceived coldness as necessary for her to advance in a male-dominated field (apparently, her job - a consultant for oil companies, effectively laying people off for them - was painstakingly researched by the director).

This movie is LONG but on reflection I am not sure much else could be cut without overly simplifying it. Every scene manages to reveal some aspect of Wilfried and Ines and their relationship. And I will say that the movie culminates in two of the very best and most affecting scenes of 2016.

Anyway, if you're up to be surprised by a 160-minute comedy of manners that triples as a satire of corporate lifestyle and a devastating, bittersweet examination of a father-daughter relationship, I highly recommend checking this movie out before it gets adapted. While Nicholson is a god, I could easily see Hollywood remaking this into a mediocre gross-out comedy. Also I just want someone else to talk about this movie with.

[Phoebe]

The sounds so completely like my cup of tea, but now you've got me excited to see the version that will have Jack Nicholson! Is this one on Netflix or Amazon by any chance?

I am incredibly excited right now to be watching this movie called The Best Offer with Geoffrey Rush, on Netflix. It is completely insane and I love it. Rush plays a man I think we could safely call bad, ethically speaking. Through his art world job he encounters a younger woman under bizarre circumstances and develops a kind of friendship with her. I'm halfway through because I have about 10 minutes per night to watch it before I collapse asleep. However I appeared to be at a point where some serious s*** is about to hit the fan and I cannot wait.

[Phoebe]

The Best Offer (2013)

This movie is amazing. Geoffrey Rush plays an antiques and art dealer and auctioneer who isn't a very nice person for reasons I won't go into for spoilers prevention. He is intrigued and frustrated by a young woman who tries to hire him to appraise her houseful of antiques. Things happen and you are suspicious of them but it's not clear how it's going to play out, and it plays out. Wow, does it ever play out. Yet the best thing about the movie, perhaps, is the ending, which absolutely broke my heart, that's all I can say. The message is basically that no matter what bad actors or fucked up situations may arise, the love a person has may be 100% real and enduring forever.

[buckett]

[Phoebe]

Oh, he is amazing. You're repulsed and fascinated and amused and disgusted and totally sympathetic to him all at once.

[Phoebe]

The Dressmaker

Stars Kate Winslet, Judy Davis, Hugo Weaving, and Liam Hemsworth. Based on a book. Woman trained as couture seamstress in Paris returns home to resolve a mystery about herself. She deals with her mother and the very odd rural Australian townspeople in the tiny railstop where she's from. The movie is an artful combination of comedic exaggerating, like heavy stage acting, and real drama. At one point I thought the movie was over and So Much Else happened! Whoa. Liam Hemsworth takes off his top and I felt, although it was for a deliberate movie purpose, that must be what it's like for straight men when women randomly undress in movies, insofar as I was definitely the audience intended. I'd give it four out of five stars, with one star deducted for using the developmentally challenged brother character in a super tired, stereotypical way, and one star added back for Judy and Hugo, period.

[Phoebe]

5 to 7

The guy who played young Chekov in the Star Trek reboot is a writer in NYC who falls in love with a woman and develops an unusual relationship. The woman is like my opposite on Earth in every way except maybe three, since we both have kids, both have very certain ideas about how they should be raised, and so on. Otherwise I don't understand this woman in the slightest, so that made it hard to grasp movie. Glenn Close showed up briefly to save it, as Chekov's Jewish mother. Also the mighty ox is delirious with fever and that may play role in inability to grasp thinky-feely picture. I'm a humble guy with (primarily) healthy desires, and I've been tired. These people are complicated and fancy. I'd give it 3 stars.

[Phoebe]

After the Wedding

The Danish people, if we had to judge from this one movie, are extremely beautiful but extremely tragic despite living in an environment of total beauty. The main character of our film works with a charity in India. He goes back to Denmark to get more funding. He is invited to a wedding. Crazy things ensue. When you've recovered from that, even crazier things ensue. I wasn't sure how to take the brief framing parts about India. On the one hand, there's a vaguely disconcerting sense of exoticism, as if the film is painting simple pictures of poor children in India who are only pawns to be affected by the Danish characters' lives and choices. But then they do some things to push back against that idea. The film shows us how the main character developed past his youthful dissolution and naive idealism, and a strong theme running throughout is the contrast between wealthy lives in Denmark and the reality for children elsewhere. Sometimes this is worked in subtly, as when the main character takes note of an incredible rug under his feet in an otherwise sterile but expensive office in Denmark, and you know kids like his in India do this work. Sometimes it's very pointed, as when the camera lingers on taxidermy in a fancy Manor, and the number of kids born each year in Denmark is compared to a tiny fraction of those needing basics in just one city in India.

Anyway, this is only the context of an intense and profoundly depressing drama. Do not watch it when you're sick or otherwise constitutionally weakened. I laid there helplessly weeping hot tears. It was a mess. I can't give any spoilers but it's a four star movie (5 on Netflix just so it will give me more like this).

[Phoebe]

Christian Mingle

So you can't say that I wasn't warned. It's right there in the title. I knew what I was getting into. I grasped fully that it might be a mistake. I knew and perversely I chose it anyway. The interesting thing is not the downside of this movie but the fact that there was so much upside. The movie illustrates in an incredibly profound and subtle fashion the important difference between tame and chaste.

The heroine is a Christian by accident of birth but not active commitment. She is drawn to a dating website for Christian singles - thus the title. She as narrator promises us that this is not just a story about her meeting some nice Christian boy and getting together but is in fact the story about her coming into a closer relationship with God. That would be a lot more convincing if the payoff at the end of the story was that she went on to greater things in life, perhaps finding some sort of new love, instead of staying hung up on some uptight jerk who was completely unpleasant to her. But so it went, despite the total lack of chemistry or spark of any form whatsoever. Riddle me this, people: why are entire cities flattened by the raw sexual chemistry on display between Judi Dench and Michael Gambon (known to some here as Albus Dumbledore) in a period TV series, 75 years old, clothed to the eyeballs and hardly even touching, but the entire courtship of the two sad sacks in this movie barely has enough force to make the viewer raise one eyebrow quizzically?

And screw Amazon for wanting to charge me money for Cranford Season 2. Darn you greedy people, what is the point of Amazon Prime if not to buy access to a decade old British TV series?

[Cazmonster]

Oh, Yes! This will do nicely.

[El Jefe]

Passengers - Have you ever wanted to perform a trepanation on yourself without the use of proper tools or surgical grade anesthesia? You could just watch this movie instead. It'll be AWESOME. You'll get to watch an utterly horrific, toxic relationship shown as normal and something to be admired. You'll also get to see a bog-standard Hollywood rom-drama (with all the stereotypes and scary as fuck relationship ideas) that was poorly attempted to be stealth written as a sci-fi movie. But the good news is, Michael Sheen, as always and forever, steals EVERY SCENE. Also, this may be the fastest Andy Garcia cameo ever. Also, the most silent.

[El Jefe]

Kong: Skull Island

All the Kong shit - Solid A. Easily the best version of Kong put to the screen, in terms of how it looked, how the fight scenes worked, and actual/quality screen time.

All the cast - A C-. Here's a phone. Now call it in. You really didn't need to focus on them anywhere near as much as you did. You needed easily recognizable caricatures, because this movie needed to just be about the GODDAMN AWESOME GORILLA. Somehow, you managed to not even get the caricatures to work. Slightly higher than the D+ it should be, because it's hard not to give extra points when you manage to show Tom Hiddleston looking like Mac Daddy Hiddleston on film, even in the middle of the fucking jungle.

The Island - Extra credit bonus here. Much of the island's ecology was everything you wanted to see in a giant monster movie. Except for the totally unexplained appearance of the Northern Lights in the very South Pacific.

The real cast (that means everyone who WAS John C. Reilly) - Extra, extra credit bonus here. You may very well have been able to chop everybody else's dialogue. Because ALL OF THE DIALOGUE SHOULD BELONG TO JOHN C. REILLY. He was awesome in this.

My friends and I were literally the only three people in this theater. We MST3K'D the shit out of the film. We actually had a blast watching it, because all the non-Kong parts, we had a blast ripping apart. It's not a complete mess, and the expected tie-in (though the timelines will be really weird on this) with Godzilla was decent. Kong himself is an utter blast.

[Phoebe]

Tried to watch a movie called "Peace, Love, and Misunderstanding." It stars Jane Fonda as an aging hippie, kind of an extremist and unethical version of one set of my in-laws, but otherwise similar. Catherine Keener plays her daughter, an uptight lawyer getting a divorce. She has teenaged kids. The dude who plays the final love interest on The Good Wife plays some new love interest for her. Why do people think women my age like that dude? Anyway, this movie is totally unwatchable, and if I'm saying that, most people here should not so much as turn it on. OMG. Trust me. Your eyes will hurt from the rolling.

[Phoebe]

Watched another movie called Hateship Loveship (2013). Stars Kristin Wiig and Guy Pearce. Nick Nolte, Jennifer Jason Leigh and a few other notables appear in supporting roles. I don't know how to describe this without spoilers that shouldn't be spoiling things. Wiig shows up to be a nanny to Nolte's granddaughter. The granddaughter lives with Nolte because her dad, Pearce, is a recovering addict who lives in another town. At first things develop somewhat slowly, but then an unexpected big thing happens, and you have no idea what's going to come of it, and gradually you see it play out in an interesting way until the end. If you think Wiig and Pearce are good actors, you'll be confirmed in that idea here and might enjoy this. In the manner of many independent movies, it's a lot quieter and slower, attending to more complicated details, than one usually expects. This can be good but can also be a little boring at times. Overall, a good movie though, worth watching. I gave it 3 stars.

[El Jefe]

The Infiltrator

It's Narcos with Bryan Cranston, in a shorter format and less Spanish-speaking actors. That's not leading up to a joke. That's also not an insult. It tells one of the more interesting side stories of the Escobar tale, and it did right some of the same things that made Narcos successful.

[Phoebe]

Slums of Beverly Hills

One Star

This movie stars Natasha Lyonne, Marisa Tomei, Alan Arkin, David Krumholtz, Kevin Corrigan, Carl Reiner... How could this possibly have deserved one star, right? Because it's stupid and the script utterly sucks. Basically Natasha's character is too young for all of this but nevertheless determines that she will begin having sex with her neighbor. Marisa Tomei plays her cousin who has all sorts of life problems, Alan Arkin is the severely dysfunctional father of Natasha and uncle to the cousin. If you can't even write a script that these actors valiantly tried to bring to life in an appealing fashion, then you can't write a script at all and should have no business doing it. There is so much about boobs in this movie it is truly astonishing. And I don't mean that this stuff happens in an appealing way even for people who like that sort of thing. Rather the goal seems to be to disturb you and make you feel a sense of angst and awkwardness. I felt none of these things; I just felt that the person who made this movie should stop inflicting things like this on everyone else. That is all. Hour and a half I'll never get back.

[Phoebe]

Lighthouse of the Orcas

Movie originally in Spanish, possibly made by/for Netflix or purchased by it? No idea what I saw here and whether it was any good, no idea whether the presentation of an autistic character was done well or poorly, but apparently it was based on a true story? Anyway, I loved it because I lack the appropriate critical distance to gain any purchase on it. Might be good or bad, who knows, but there were orcas and sea lions and horses and an awful lot of pleasing woolen textiles in between.

A mother brings her autistic son to remote reaches of Patagonia (cue Alone here...) because he is most happy about a nature TV show about the orcas of Patagonia, studied by this park ranger/scientist. You're not supposed to play with the orcas in the ocean, for many reasons, but of course, the ranger is a rebel who does this. He also happens, coincidentally I'm sure, to be totally hot with beautiful piercing blue eyes. Also happens to be a bit crazy, of course, needing nearly as much help relating emotionally to other human beings as the autistic son does. I spent most of the movie worried something bad was going to happen to the kid, so I guess it was a psychologically revealing and possibly even therapeutic experience.

[Phoebe]

Arctic Heart 2016

Husband's review: that was some kind of seriously fucked up movie.

My review: this is fucking amazing.

This is a French movie. I began watching it thinking it was a straightforward light comedy about a hapless assistant in a science lab, studying genetic modifications in penguins and mice. Husband, with impeccable timing, showed up the moment it became a completely absurd pornographic movie. It wasn't like this before! I protested. Yeah, right, he said. However, let me tell you, porn is normally lost on me. I hadn't seen any worth seeing, ever. This movie was, in comparison, revelatory. I have never seen the like. Only afterward did it occur to me that I don't think we really "saw" anything. I think it's technically a pg-13 movie. Nevertheless, this is my idea of successful pornography. This is at long last some actual quality pornography. It's not perfect, because it's about penguins and set in cold places, and to be perfect it would have to be somewhat less cold with something other than penguins. But otherwise, yeah. This movie, I announced without normal knowing, was made by a woman. Sure enough, the writer/director is a woman. It's intentionally ridiculous, just so you know. That's partly why it works, because life is ridiculous.

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