Top 5. Immediately. I think this is the fastest I've ever given a movie a top 5, I just don't know where it stands yet. I watched this about a month ago, and I'm only getting around to this blog now because I wanted to wait for the recency bias to wear off. And because of the sheer spectacle this movie contains, there was a lot of recency bias. If you haven't seen Dune 1 yet and you want to see Dune 2, you have to watch the first one to understand anything that's going on. Yeah, people are right about Dune 1 being pretty slow, but it successfully manages to establish Arrakis and Paul & his family's politics very well. Dune 2, on the other hand, is a rollercoaster of movement the entire time. Because of how slow the first Dune moved, this one also picks up pretty slow, but once it gets started it does not stop. The action is smooth, the CGI is fantastic, the soundtrack is incredible, and the acting is top-notch. I'd be surprised if this movie makes less than 3 Oscars this year, but after seeing Barbie get robbed, it's hard to tell. What's even harder to tell is how much I loved this movie. Not because there's only a few details I loved, but because of how stroy-rich this movie is. I don't think I can say a single thing about this without spoiling it, so this post might feel a little lackluster in terms of synopsis. But oh my god is this movie epic. I don't mean that in a Reddit-ish way, but the way the movie's filmed makes it feel like a fantastic epic. If there's one thing that I love above everything else that this movie does well, it's the sandworms. Again, I can't say much without spoiling the movie, so just know that both of these movies are fantastic ways to kill 12 hours. I've got nothing to complain about in this movie, so I think that Denis Villenueve's Dune: Part Two gets a perfect score. 10/10
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I watched this a while back as the start to a 200 days 200 movies thing with a couple of my other firends. I've got a couple issues with that, one being the fact that because of how good this movie is, it was gonna be hard to even compete with the sheer emotion and suspense this movie produced. Another issue being that we only lasted about a month before everyone dropped out. Great run, guys. Real team effort there. I can't even be mad, we all had practically no time to watch that many movies at that time in the first place. Oh right, the movie. Like I said in the first "paragraph," almost no other movie I've watched can honestly compete with the suspense and pure dread this movie was manage to capture. The only other one being Society of the Snow, but I don't want to spoil that blog post (it's probably going to be next (but who knows? (I sure don't))). The way this movie creates tension is amazing. I've had some of my friends say it's way too slow, but I think it's perfectly paced for how long it is, especially considering the stakes at hand and the ending. The story follows two families, both of which lose their youngest daughter during a Thanksgiving party. They, along with the help of a far too suspicious detective, attempt to find their daughters, with a number of bumps along the way (and by bumps I mean torture). The movie sets up as a lighthearted, family movie at Thanksgiving time, but quickly goes down the drain after their daughters go missing. This sets up the stakes for the movie, as the first 48 hours in a missing persons case are the most crucial. The movie is a fantastic exploration of mania and panic, and if you know me at all, you know I love movies that explore human emotion. The casting's great, the acting is top tier, it's got Paul Dano in it, there really isn't that much I have to complain about in this movie. I think if I was going to pick one thing, it'd be that the movie's a little long. But honestly, I don't care about how long it is, because this movie's just so (imagine I used a word here starting with "d" for emphasis) good. Might even be a top 5, but I'll have to revisit it before I decide that. 9.5/10If you asked me to give you a movie that was insane, outrageous, and heartfelt all in one, I'd give you Milos Forman's 1975 masterpiece One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Besides the fact that this movie is literally nuts, it's a chaotic collage I haven't seen this well put together, or performed, in any other movie. This is another example of a movie that could not have done well if the actors didn't give it everything they had. But this time, instead of a stale, undercooked plot (I'm looking at you, Poor Things), it's a super interesting and unique storyline that, once again, I haven't seen in any other movie. I do know a song that follows the plot pretty closely (Joe Hawley of Tally Hall's The Mind Electric) but that's a different story. In one sentence, a man is sentenced to a work prison, but instead of going to the prison, he pretends he's crazy and gets sent to an asylum, where chaos soon follows. He shows the patients what life's really like. Shows them how to play basketball, how to have fun despite the strictness of the ward, and even sneaks the patients out of the hospital to go on a fishing trip. If you're anything like me, you'd think that this is a super interesting concept for a film. But that's not even the best part. I know I talk a lot about how a cast's performance can really affect how the movie turns out on this blog, and this movie is no exception to that. I don't think I can really say how well every single actor played their part in this movie. Jack Nicholson is convincingly unpredictable, and this really shows as a testament to his and his co-stars' raw talent showcased here. 9.5/10There's not enough words in the world to describe how weird this movie is nor are there any words to describe how I felt watching it. I don't know what I felt while watching this, but discomfort's putting it lightly.
I saw Poor Things with my friend, Jacob (his blog's here), about a week after it came out and thank God for him because I would not have made it through that alone. From start to finish, this movie was a roller coaster of emotion that made it genuinely difficult to pull your eyes away from the screen, but at the same time made you want to hate every movie you've ever watched. It's a disturbing perversion of how people grow up and find themselves. And I'm going to be honest, we were either going to see this or Wonka and we chose this because it looked better and was up for a number of Oscar categories. We should've just done Wonka. So, after just crapping on the movie the entire introduction, it really seems like this movie could never redeem itself in any categories. But the parts that are good are magnificent. The most obvious example of this being the actors. Poor Things shines almost entirely through its actors. Willem Dafoe, Emma Stone, and Mark Ruffalo all explore characters that are wildly different than any other character I've any of them play before. Well, Ruffalo's mad for a lot of the movie. I feel like there's a series of movies where his alter ego is triggered by him being mad, but I just can't think of it. Anyway, the acting. Poor Things relies almost entirely on its actors to keep the audience entertained, because the plot would have definitely scared most of the audience out if the acting wasn't good. But genuinely, the acting in this is phenomenal. Each one of the actors absolutely sold their parts and I'm not surprised that Emma Stone got Best Actress for this. But that doesn't mean I like this movie. I can't think of a reason to like this that isn't the acting or the costuming, and that's because of how the movie unfolds. It follows a young woman's coming of age (literally) and how she learns to view the world and empower herself. Reading that sentence, you'd think that this is a pretty good movie, right? But that's the most basic, absolute rock-bottom plot synopsis of this movie. I don't want to spoil anything because the twist is kind of freaky, and if you've read this blog at all you know I love freaky elements in movies, but the rest of this movie is absolutely an exception to that. I sawthis over the weekend (Saturday I think) with another friend, Liam (his blog's here), and I'm less than impressed. As a huge fan of the original, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, I was constantly looking for callbacks and references to it throughout the movie. Yeah, there were some (the tune the Oompa Loompa played on the flute, Willy walking back up three steps after going down three), but honestly that's the only part of the movie I really enjoyed. I'd start a paragraph here detailing what I liked about the movie, but there honestly isn't much so it's just not worth making one. And on that note, I really didn't like Wonka that much. I understand the appeal and the plot made sense, but it wasn't portrayed in a very entertaining or engaging way at all. First up: the acting. Namely, Timothee Chalamet. I don't get why people like this guy as an actor. Is it the face? I genuinely hope that he's only popular because people think he's cute, because he's not a good actor. I saw Dune a couple months ago, and thought he was either under or over acting, and he does the same thing here as Willy Wonka. It's like he can't decide whether he wants to be Gene Wilder's version of the character or his own. During the songs, he barely expresses himself during the songs, and focuses more on movement than facial expression, which I'd argue is equally as important. Which brings me to my next point: the music. It seems like, outside of Disney, musicals are a dying trend among theater productions in general. In the early-to-mid 20th century, it felt like musicals were everywhere. Because of this, the songs in these musicals are well-thought-out and easily recognizable, and help to express either a character or group of characters' thoughts, or explain certain plot points and move the story along. But there's something with newer musicals, and music in general, that I've noticed. Music now feels like it's manufactured to be catchy rather than truly expressive of something. People love catchy songs, and I don't blame them. They're catchy. But being catchy should never be the driving force behind a song if you want it to last a while. Think Pure Imagination from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Nothing in that song is inherently catchy, but it's hard to deny its impact and longevity over the years because it doesn't focus on being catchy. The biggest culprit of this is in the song "Scrub Scrub" in Wonka. It's got a steady tempo that doesn't change much, and it's easy to keep a beat with it. This makes the song less focused on its meaning and expression of the characters, and more focused on keeping the viewer engaged. It's a mediocre movie backed up by bland, uninspired music that retains none of the personality of the original. 4/10I want to preface this by saying that I've never seen a Miyazaki movie (or Studio Ghibli movie for that matter), so there's no possible way I could be biased. At all. I try to keep an open mind whenever I watch a movie I haven't seen before. I know that Miyazaki movies are very unique and sometimes pretty weird, but weird's a bit of an understatement here. The story follows Mahito, a boy who lost his mother in a fire and moves to the Japanese countryside with his father following her death. There, they meet Natsuko, Mahito's new mother, and go to her house where they meet the Heron for the first time. Mahito starts exploring almost immediately, and after sent to school for one day, bludgeons himself with a rock to his head to make it seem like he got in a fight in order to get out of going to school again. Mahito's a real one for that. But, due to his injury, he's forbidden from leaving his room and is kept under a watchful eye by Natsuko's maids (?). Despite this, Mahito is able to sneak away from them in time to find his way into an Alice-in-Wonderland-type world that allows him to face his mother's death and finally get over the events that occurred more than 3 years prior. Like last week, I'm going to start actually reviewing by saying what I liked about this movie. And I like this movie a lot. I said earlier in this blog about how this movie's pretty weird, but I'm a huge fan of movies that express themselves in weird and unique ways. It's the most creative way I've seen anyone portray grief and how the protagonist overcomes it. It takes a deep dive into the mind of Mohito as he tries to confront his mother's death and his inability to save her. Of course, you can't talk about a Ghibli movie without talking about how beautiful it looks. Every single frame is drawn and animated with a quality that's second to none, and every single shot looks gorgeous. My favorite part of this animation style is how they animated the fire. Throughout the movie, Mohito antagonizes the fire as the thing that took away his mother. He remembers how the flames nearly engulfed him as he tried to reach her, but was unable. This feeling is recreated with the way that the fire is drawn. It fills the whole screen and is drawn with a very hostile energy that's easy to pick up on and helps the viewer connect more with Mohito. If nothing else, Ghibli completely mastered the art of animation with The Boy and the Heron. Now, let's talk about what I didn't like about this movie. I've mentioned how much I love weird movies, but generally those movies have a pretty rigid structure. The Boy and the Heron, however, does not have a definitive structure. I heard my English & film teacher say that Miyazaki sort of writes these movies as he goes along, and this movie's very telling of that. The main plot can be understood, but it's tied pretty loosely together. At one point in the movie, it's difficult to remember why Mohito even ventured into the other world in the first place, because at that point it seems like he's just trying to escape and not find Natsuke. I like this movie a lot, but I think that if they spent a little bit more time defining and refining the actual story into a more cohesive narrative, it'd just work better in that regard. I've got one last thing I want to bring up that I didn't necessarily like or dislike, and that's how the movie ended (this is usually the part in an AP DBQ that gets you the complexity point.) At the end of the movie, Mohito refuses to follow in his great-grand-uncle's footsteps, and leaves the world to crumble behind him. In doing so, he saves Natsuke from the malice in that world, but destroys lives. But, he's also defining his own future. Rather than do what was laid out for him, and rather than live in a world that could truly be all-good, he takes the more difficult option and lives in a world that finds balance in the chaos of good and evil, and I think that's noble. 8/10I want to preface this week's post by saying that I generally hate action movies. They overdo the action, create unrealistic stories, and almost never are able to fully flesh out the plots they're given. Unfortunately, District 9 falls into that "never" category for me. District 9 was an interesting movie, and I don't mean interesting in a great way. I've got a friend that always spoke really highly of this movie, and since we're doing a 200 Days 200 Movies thing, I decided to give it a try. Well, not really "decided", because we all take turns picking movies and this was the one he chose. But I still chose to watch it to honor the rules. So going into this, you can imagine I had pretty high expectations for this movie. And on that note, let's talk about what I liked about the movie. For one, it's a pretty unique and interesting concept. Aliens come to Earth not out of hostility, but out of desperation. When the humans did attempt making contact with the aliens, they seemed deprived of nutrition and desperate for escape from the ship that seemed to have trapped them there. Upon releasing them, the citizens of Johannesburg immediately turn to violence against the "prawns," and a militarized zone is dedicated to the "safety" and study of them. Shocking. Something else of note, that they even brought up in the opening of the movie, is the fact that rather than parking over some major city in the US like New York or Los Angeles, the ship parked over Johanessburg, South Africa. The conflict was also pretty interesting. Wikus, the protagonist, is not only fighting to save himself, but rather save himself from a virus that slowly ended up turning him into one of the prawns. Throughout the movie, he's constantly attempting to get Christopher, a prawn he befriended, back onto the mothership so he can save his own people and get the cure for the virus that Wikus took on. And now, time for something completely different: what I didn't like about District 9. I mentioned this in my review of Gravity last week, and that's that I simply don't care about the characters. The movie's documentary-style of filming made it pretty weird to follow, especially at the beginning. The sheer number of people that the movie opens with talking to the camera for the in-world documentary leaves for a pretty confusing first 20 minutes, where it's hard to figure out who the main character is. This confusing 20 minutes doesn't sound like much, but when most of the rest of the movie is following the same one guy and not much else, it's not exactly an ideal way to watch a movie. Forgetting the first 20 minutes, I kind of liked the first half of the movie. It sets off with a pretty interesting conflict, about a guy fighting a virus, the military, and aliens at the same time. But then it devolves into a generic, guns-blazing, explosive action movie. Like I said at the start, I hate action movies for not being able to flesh out the stories they have. District 9 absolutely could have had the chance to do so, but since the sequel for it got cancelled, it leaves a lot of loose ends by the end. If this movie had gotten a sequel, I genuinely think it could have been a lot better than it turned out to be. But honestly, it isn't. 6/10This was a movie, for sure. Was it a great movie? Not really. Was it a good movie? Yeah, I'd argue that it was. Released in 2013 by Alfonso Cuaron, Gravity is a movie following an astronaut's attempts to get back to Earth after a storm of debris destroyed her space station, along with the help of another astronaut from the same space station. Sometimes. It's hard to talk about this movie without talking about how gorgeous it is. Being a space movie, Gravity is full of beautiful CGI-"enhanced" camerawork and stellar shots of Earth. Another thing I enjoyed about the movie is the setting. I've said it before and I'll say it again, I love movies that confine themselves to one or a few settings. I think it can bring out really creative stories and scenarios, because it's harder to rely on the setting for major plot points. Traditionally, this style of filming can also bring out the best in characters. Unfortunately, for this movie, it did not. The biggest complaint I have about Gravity is the characters. For one, George Clooney's in it and he's the king of being able to play only one character: the smug, sarcastic, charming guy that thinks he knows better than everyone (this works really well for O Brother, Where Art Thou but that's an entirely different movie.) Very little is known about the characters, so it's hard to actually connect with and care about them. Even though there's really only two characters, I found it genuinely difficult to care about either one of them. I enjoyed the movie, its setting, and for the most part the plot, but I honestly don't care about either of the characters or their motives. 6.5/10Going into this, I knew that Tarantino was famous for a lot of violence and just over-the-top performances from everyone in his movies. That being said, no amount of knowledge on his other movies could honestly have prepared me enough for it. The Hateful Eight is probably the single most gruesome movie I've ever seen. At first glance, it seems like it's going ot be a movie where 8 people become trapped in a cabin and bond because they can't leave. I can't stress enough how much it isn't that. They start off getting along, but when suspicion rises about where Minnie and Sweet Dave are, the movie quickly turns into a whodunit shootout, as the men slowly pick off each other in order to either collect a bounty, or to kill the men who killed Minnie and Sweet Dave. The movie is violent, vulgar, and some of the best usage of suspense I've seen so far. It's a masterpiece of tension between the characters, and it's genuinely frightening to see who's going to get killed off next, and I never could have guessed the direction the movie was going to go. One thing I love about this movie is the setting. For a majority of the movie, the characters all spend their time in Minnie's Haberdashery, a lodge on the way to Red Rock. The story, and all of its arcs, take place in this lodge. I love when movies keep the setting the same throughout the movie. It feels like the story is far more unique and in-depth when a movie's setting is consistent. Films like Rope and Vivarium also make use of this technique, and it's these films that easily stand out in a roster because of the way they're performed. I liked Taraninto's The Hateful Eight a lot, and I think it masters the one-setting movie. 9/10Oh man, this sure is the movie ever. Definitely enjoyed my time watching this. No, I'm kidding it's great. Might be the weakest of the three Simon Pegg & Nick Frost movies, (I think it's the Cornetto Trilogy), but it's still really good. It's funny and unique, but it also pulls a lot of elements from the other two in the "trilogy." Edgar Wright sticks to his guns here through subversive comedy and overly dramatized characters in wacky scenarios. It's a very powerful combination of elements, though, it does not get old. One thing I think this movie did better than the other two was the action sequences. They're synced up with the music which is rare anymore. But like the other two in the trilogy, there is a lot of action with fast camera motion and engaging action. "The World's End" is finally able to master the techniques that Wright uses for directing action scenes, where the camera moves fast but not too fast, and he's able to capture more in the scenes he does shoot. I love this movie just as much as the other ones in the Cornetto Trilogy. I think that Wright is able to get full performances out of just about everyone in the movie, and it goes to show just how diverse that Pegg and Frost are as actors, being three wildly different types of best friends across all the movies they share. 9.5/10 |
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